Re: URLEncoder and #

From:
=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Arne_Vajh=F8j?= <arne@vajhoej.dk>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
Sat, 21 Jun 2014 23:10:57 -0400
Message-ID:
<53a64941$0$293$14726298@news.sunsite.dk>
On 6/20/2014 11:22 AM, markspace wrote:

On 6/20/2014 8:06 AM, Roedy Green wrote:

On Wed, 18 Jun 2014 11:30:23 +0100, Nigel Wade <nmw@ion.le.ac.uk>
wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who said :

The AppVisor people are complaining about URLs containing # saying
they need to be URLEncoded. Surely that is not true.


I think it probably is true.


If wanted to include # in a file name you would encode it, but if you
meant it to introduce an anchor on the page you would not, right?


If by "file name" you mean the path part of the URI, then yes. However
watch out for including other special characters in the anchor:

http://foo.com/path#my#1anchor

Will confuse most parsers and is probably a syntax error anyway. Also
watch out for the query part of the URI, which needs to be encoded
differently.

http://foo.com/path?a=#1,b=#2#anchor

Is also incorrectly encoded.


I think a lot of the confusion about this class comes from its name.

Contrary to its name it is not used to encode URL's.

It is documented. Java docs says:

<quote>
Utility class for HTML form encoding. This class contains static methods
for converting a String to the application/x-www-form-urlencoded MIME
format. For more information about HTML form encoding, consult the HTML
specification.
</quote>

But just the name gives people the wrong associations.

Arne

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