JAVA URLEncoder : form encoding

URLEncoder class is used for HTML form encoding. This class contains static methods for converting a String to the application/x-www-form-urlencoded MIME format. URLEnocder class converts any non alpha-numeric characters (except ".", "-", "*", and "_") to %sequences.

import java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException;
import java.net.URISyntaxException;
import java.net.URLEncoder;

public class Main {
  public static void main(String args[]) throws URISyntaxException, UnsupportedEncodingException {
    String data = "Simple text data!@#$";
    
    String encodeData = URLEncoder.encode(data, "UTF-8");
    System.out.println(encodeData);
  }
}

Output

Simple+text+data%21%40%23%24

Why should we encode URLs?
Consider for example, in a query string, the ampersand (&) is used as a separator between key and value pairs (name=krishna&age=26). If any of the parameter value has an ampersand in it, it would look like the separator between the end of a value and the beginning of the next key. So for special characters like this, we use URL encoding so that we can be sure that the data is unambiguously encoded.

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