Escaping ampersands in URLs for HttpClient requests

Posted by jpatokal on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by jpatokal
Published on 2010-04-01T04:25:19Z Indexed on 2010/04/01 4:33 UTC
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So I've got some Java code that uses Jakarta HttpClient like this:

URI aURI = new URI( "http://host/index.php?title=" + title + "&action=edit" );
GetMethod aRequest = new GetMethod( aURI.getEscapedPathQuery());

The problem is that if title includes any ampersands (&), they're considered parameter delimiters and the request goes screwy... and if I replace them with the URL-escaped equivalent %26, then this gets double-escaped by getEscapedPathQuery() into %2526.

I'm currently working around this by basically repairing the damage afterward:

URI aURI = new URI( "http://host/index.php?title=" + title.replace("&", "%26") + "&action=edit" );
GetMethod aRequest = new GetMethod( aURI.getEscapedPathQuery().replace("%2526", "%26"));

But there has to be a nicer way to do this, right? Note that the title can contain any number of unpredictable UTF-8 chars etc, so escaping everything else is a requirement.

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