Parsing query strings on Android

Question

Java EE has ServletRequest.getParameterValues().

On non-EE platforms, URL.getQuery() simply returns a string.

What\'s the normal way to properly parse the qu

Answer 1

Apache AXIS2 has a self-contained implementation of QueryStringParser.java. If you are not using Axis2, just download the sourcecode and test case from here -

http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/axis/axis2/java/core/trunk/modules/kernel/src/org/apache/axis2/transport/http/util/QueryStringParser.java

http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/axis/axis2/java/core/trunk/modules/kernel/test/org/apache/axis2/transport/http/util/QueryStringParserTest.java

Answer 2

public static Map <String, String> parseQueryString (final URL url)
        throws UnsupportedEncodingException
{
    final Map <String, String> qps = new TreeMap <String, String> ();
    final StringTokenizer pairs = new StringTokenizer (url.getQuery (), "&");
    while (pairs.hasMoreTokens ())
    {
        final String pair = pairs.nextToken ();
        final StringTokenizer parts = new StringTokenizer (pair, "=");
        final String name = URLDecoder.decode (parts.nextToken (), "ISO-8859-1");
        final String value = URLDecoder.decode (parts.nextToken (), "ISO-8859-1");
        qps.put (name, value);
    }
    return qps;
}

Answer 3

If you have jetty (server or client) libs on your classpath you can use the jetty util classes (see javadoc), e.g.:

import org.eclipse.jetty.util.*;
URL url = new URL("www.example.com/index.php?foo=bar&bla=blub");
MultiMap<String> params = new MultiMap<String>();
UrlEncoded.decodeTo(url.getQuery(), params, "UTF-8");

assert params.getString("foo").equals("bar");
assert params.getString("bla").equals("blub");

Answer 4

Guava's Multimap is better suited for this. Here is a short clean version:

Multimap<String, String> getUrlParameters(String url) {
        try {
            Multimap<String, String> ret = ArrayListMultimap.create();
            for (NameValuePair param : URLEncodedUtils.parse(new URI(url), "UTF-8")) {
                ret.put(param.getName(), param.getValue());
            }
            return ret;
        } catch (URISyntaxException e) {
            throw new RuntimeException(e);
        }
    }

Answer 5

this method takes the uri and return map of par name and par value

  public static Map<String, String> getQueryMap(String uri) {

    String queryParms[] = uri.split("\\?");

    Map<String, String> map = new HashMap<>();// 

    if (queryParms == null || queryParms.length == 0) return map;

    String[] params = queryParms[1].split("&");
    for (String param : params) {
        String name = param.split("=")[0];
        String value = param.split("=")[1];
        map.put(name, value);
    }
    return map;
}

Answer 6

Just for reference, this is what I've ended up with (based on URLEncodedUtils, and returning a Map).

Features:

• it accepts the query string part of the url (you can use request.getQueryString())
• an empty query string will produce an empty Map
• a parameter without a value (?test) will be mapped to an empty List<String>

Code:

public static Map<String, List<String>> getParameterMapOfLists(String queryString) {
    Map<String, List<String>> mapOfLists = new HashMap<String, List<String>>();
    if (queryString == null || queryString.length() == 0) {
        return mapOfLists;
    }
    List<NameValuePair> list = URLEncodedUtils.parse(URI.create("http://localhost/?" + queryString), "UTF-8");
    for (NameValuePair pair : list) {
        List<String> values = mapOfLists.get(pair.getName());
        if (values == null) {
            values = new ArrayList<String>();
            mapOfLists.put(pair.getName(), values);
        }
        if (pair.getValue() != null) {
            values.add(pair.getValue());
        }
    }

    return mapOfLists;
}

A compatibility helper (values are stored in a String array just as in ServletRequest.getParameterMap()):

public static Map<String, String[]> getParameterMap(String queryString) {
    Map<String, List<String>> mapOfLists = getParameterMapOfLists(queryString);

    Map<String, String[]> mapOfArrays = new HashMap<String, String[]>();
    for (String key : mapOfLists.keySet()) {
        mapOfArrays.put(key, mapOfLists.get(key).toArray(new String[] {}));
    }

    return mapOfArrays;
}