This does not have anything to do with character encodings such as UTF-8 or ASCII. The string you have there is URL encoded. This kind of encoding is something entirely different than character encoding. Try something like this: try { String result = java.net.URLDecoder.decode(url, StandardCharsets.UTF_8.name()); } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) { // not going to happen … Read more
It will depend on your purpose. If interoperability with other systems is important then it seems rawurlencode is the way to go. The one exception is legacy systems which expect the query string to follow form-encoding style of spaces encoded as + instead of %20 (in which case you need urlencode). rawurlencode follows RFC 1738 … Read more
From Wikipedia (emphasis and link added): When data that has been entered into HTML forms is submitted, the form field names and values are encoded and sent to the server in an HTTP request message using method GET or POST, or, historically, via email. The encoding used by default is based on a very early … Read more