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

Origanally answered here

On Android, there is Uri class in package android.net . Note that Uri is part of android.net, while URI is part of java.net .

Uri class has many functions to extract query key-value pairs.

Following function returns key-value pairs in the form of HashMap.

In Java:

Map<String, String> getQueryKeyValueMap(Uri uri){
    HashMap<String, String> keyValueMap = new HashMap();
    String key;
    String value;

    Set<String> keyNamesList = uri.getQueryParameterNames();
    Iterator iterator = keyNamesList.iterator();

    while (iterator.hasNext()){
        key = (String) iterator.next();
        value = uri.getQueryParameter(key);
        keyValueMap.put(key, value);
    }
    return keyValueMap;
}

In Kotlin:

fun getQueryKeyValueMap(uri: Uri): HashMap<String, String> {
        val keyValueMap = HashMap<String, String>()
        var key: String
        var value: String

        val keyNamesList = uri.queryParameterNames
        val iterator = keyNamesList.iterator()

        while (iterator.hasNext()) {
            key = iterator.next() as String
            value = uri.getQueryParameter(key) as String
            keyValueMap.put(key, value)
        }
        return keyValueMap
    }

Answer 2

Answering here because this is a popular thread. This is a clean solution in Kotlin that uses the recommended UrlQuerySanitizer api. See the official documentation. I have added a string builder to concatenate and display the params.

    var myURL: String? = null
    // if the url is sent from a different activity where you set it to a value
    if (intent.hasExtra("my_value")) {
        myURL = intent.extras.getString("my_value")
    } else {
        myURL = intent.dataString
    }

    val sanitizer = UrlQuerySanitizer(myURL)
    // We don't want to manually define every expected query *key*, so we set this to true
    sanitizer.allowUnregisteredParamaters = true
    val parameterNamesToValues: List<UrlQuerySanitizer.ParameterValuePair> = sanitizer.parameterList
    val parameterIterator: Iterator<UrlQuerySanitizer.ParameterValuePair> = parameterNamesToValues.iterator()

    // Helper simply so we can display all values on screen
    val stringBuilder = StringBuilder()

    while (parameterIterator.hasNext()) {
        val parameterValuePair: UrlQuerySanitizer.ParameterValuePair = parameterIterator.next()
        val parameterName: String = parameterValuePair.mParameter
        val parameterValue: String = parameterValuePair.mValue

        // Append string to display all key value pairs
        stringBuilder.append("Key: $parameterName\nValue: $parameterValue\n\n")
    }

    // Set a textView's text to display the string
    val paramListString = stringBuilder.toString()
    val textView: TextView = findViewById(R.id.activity_title) as TextView
    textView.text = "Paramlist is \n\n$paramListString"

    // to check if the url has specific keys
    if (sanitizer.hasParameter("type")) {
        val type = sanitizer.getValue("type")
        println("sanitizer has type param $type")
    }

Answer 3

On Android, the Apache libraries provide a Query parser:

http://developer.android.com/reference/org/apache/http/client/utils/URLEncodedUtils.html and http://hc.apache.org/httpcomponents-client-ga/httpclient/apidocs/org/apache/http/client/utils/URLEncodedUtils.html

Answer 4

On Android its simple as the code below:

UrlQuerySanitizer sanitzer = new UrlQuerySanitizer(url);
String value = sanitzer.getValue("your_get_parameter");

Also if you don't want to register each expected query key use:

sanitzer.setAllowUnregisteredParamaters(true)

Before calling:

sanitzer.parseUrl(yourUrl)

Answer 5

This works for me.. I'm not sure why every one was after a Map, List> All I needed was a simple name value Map.

To keep things simple I used the build in URI.getQuery();

public static Map<String, String> getUrlParameters(URI uri)
    throws UnsupportedEncodingException {
    Map<String, String> params = new HashMap<String, String>();
    for (String param : uri.getQuery().split("&")) {
        String pair[] = param.split("=");
        String key = URLDecoder.decode(pair[0], "UTF-8");
        String value = "";
        if (pair.length > 1) {
            value = URLDecoder.decode(pair[1], "UTF-8");
        }
        params.put(new String(key), new String(value));
    }
    return params;
}

Answer 6

Use Apache HttpComponents and wire it up with some collection code to access params by value: http://www.joelgerard.com/2012/09/14/parsing-query-strings-in-java-and-accessing-values-by-key/