Escaping ampersands in URLs for HttpClient requests
- by jpatokal
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.