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.
When encoding a String, the following rules apply:
- The alphanumeric characters "
a
" through
"z
", "A
" through
"Z
" and "0
"
through "9
" remain the same.
- The special characters "
.
",
"-
", "*
", and
"_
" remain the same.
- The space character "
" is
converted into a plus sign "+
".
- All other characters are unsafe and are first converted into
one or more bytes using some encoding scheme. Then each byte is
represented by the 3-character string
"
%xy
", where xy is the
two-digit hexadecimal representation of the byte.
The recommended encoding scheme to use is UTF-8. However,
for compatibility reasons, if an encoding is not specified,
then the default encoding of the platform is used.
For example using UTF-8 as the encoding scheme the string "The
string ü@foo-bar" would get converted to
"The+string+%C3%BC%40foo-bar" because in UTF-8 the character
ü is encoded as two bytes C3 (hex) and BC (hex), and the
character @ is encoded as one byte 40 (hex).