Safe URI building

Question

I'm writing a class in Java which access the url http://hostA/webProjectB/ServletC with some parameters. Since it is a get http call I can append the parameters to the URL ..

http://hostA/webProjectB/ServletC?parameter1=California&parameter2=yes

This returns a response in xml format <root><parameter3>123</parameter3></root>

Basically I'm interested in extracting the value of parameter3 in my http response which I know how to do.

My question is the WebUrl upto the servlet I'm storing in an external configuration which I retrieve as a String and can I simply append the get call parameters 1 and 2 to this string I retrieve ? Will this create any possible issues if I built the get URL as a string ?

Answer 1

You need to ensure that you are encoding the parameters you are defining correctly, ie using URLEncoder.encode(string,charset) .

You might be better served with one of the URI templating libraries, ie Handy URI Templates or the JAX-RS UriBuilder

Otherwise, as long as you are escaping characters correctly (ie URLEncoder.encode(string,charset) for both the param name and value) you should be fine