java.net
class URLDecoder

java.lang.Object java.net.URLDecoder

public class URLDecoder
extends Object

Utility class for HTML form decoding. This class contains static methods for decoding a String from the application/x-www-form-urlencoded MIME format.

To conversion process is the reverse of that used by the URLEncoder class. It is assumed that all characters in the encoded string are one of the following: "a" through "z", "A" through "Z", "0" through "9", and "-", "_", ".", and "*". The character "%" is allowed but is interpreted as the start of a special escaped sequence.

The following rules are applied in the conversion:

• The alphanumeric characters "a" through "z", "A" through "Z" and "0" through "9" remain the same.
• The special characters ".", "-", "*", and "_" remain the same.
• The plus sign "+" is converted into a space character " " .
• A sequence of the form "%xy" will be treated as representing a byte where xy is the two-digit hexadecimal representation of the 8 bits. Then, all substrings that contain one or more of these byte sequences consecutively will be replaced by the character(s) whose encoding would result in those consecutive bytes. The encoding scheme used to decode these characters may be specified, or if unspecified, the default encoding of the platform will be used.

There are two possible ways in which this decoder could deal with illegal strings. It could either leave illegal characters alone or it could throw an {@link java.lang.IllegalArgumentException}. Which approach the decoder takes is left to the implementation.

See Also (auto-generated):

URLEncoder

StringBuffer

URL

URLDecoder

public URLDecoder()

decode

public static String decode(String s)

Decodes a x-www-form-urlencoded string. The platform's default encoding is used to determine what characters are represented by any consecutive sequences of the form "%xy".

Parameters:

s - the String to decode

Returns:

the newly decoded String

decode

public static String decode(String s,
                            String enc)
                     throws UnsupportedEncodingException

Decodes a application/x-www-form-urlencoded string using a specific encoding scheme. The supplied encoding is used to determine what characters are represented by any consecutive sequences of the form "%xy".

Note: The World Wide Web Consortium Recommendation states that UTF-8 should be used. Not doing so may introduce incompatibilites.

Parameters:

s - the String to decode

enc - The name of a supported character encoding.

Returns:

the newly decoded String

Throws:

UnsupportedEncodingException - If character encoding needs to be consulted, but named character encoding is not supported