Java™ Platform
Standard Ed. 6

java.net
Class URLDecoder

java.lang.Object
  extended by 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:

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 IllegalArgumentException. Which approach the decoder takes is left to the implementation.

Since:
1.2

Constructor Summary
URLDecoder()
           
 
Method Summary
static String decode(String s)
          Deprecated. The resulting string may vary depending on the platform's default encoding. Instead, use the decode(String,String) method to specify the encoding.
static String decode(String s, String enc)
          Decodes a application/x-www-form-urlencoded string using a specific encoding scheme.
 
Methods inherited from class java.lang.Object
clone, equals, finalize, getClass, hashCode, notify, notifyAll, toString, wait, wait, wait
 

Constructor Detail

URLDecoder

public URLDecoder()
Method Detail

decode

@Deprecated
public static String decode(String s)
Deprecated. The resulting string may vary depending on the platform's default encoding. Instead, use the decode(String,String) method to specify the encoding.

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
Since:
1.4
See Also:
URLEncoder.encode(java.lang.String, java.lang.String)

Java™ Platform
Standard Ed. 6

Submit a bug or feature
For further API reference and developer documentation, see Java SE Developer Documentation. That documentation contains more detailed, developer-targeted descriptions, with conceptual overviews, definitions of terms, workarounds, and working code examples.

Copyright © 1993, 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.