URL decoding: UnsupportedEncodingException in Java

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It cannot happen, unless there is something fundamentally broken in your JVM. But I think you should write this as:

try {
    value = URLDecoder.decode(keyVal[1], "UTF-8");
} catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
    throw new AssertionError("UTF-8 is unknown");
    // or 'throw new AssertionError("Impossible things are happening today. " +
    //                              "Consider buying a lottery ticket!!");'
}

The cost of doing this is a few bytes of code that will “never” be executed, and one String literal that will never be used. That a small price for the protecting against the possibility that you may have misread / misunderstood the javadocs (you haven’t in this case …) or that the specs might change (they won’t in this case …)

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