Creating a uri from a string, over encoding

Question

I'm parsing some links on a webpage and then testing if these links exist or not. I am converting the parsed link strings into uri's, the problem is some of the links already have encoded characters like the following: http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/3/c/63c1d527-9d7e-4fd6-9867-fd0632066740/kinect_qsg%20premium_bndl_en-fr-es.pdf

Which when passed through my code below I get: http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/3/c/63c1d527-9d7e-4fd6-9867-fd0632066740/kinect_qsg%2520premium_bndl_en-fr-es.pdf

Which as you can see is encoding the %20. How do I avoid this? Should I decode my string's first? And if so what's the best way to do this?

URL url = null;
        URI uri = null;
        try {
            url = new URL(checkUrl);
        } catch (MalformedURLException e1) {
            e1.printStackTrace();
        }
        try {
            uri = new URI(url.getProtocol(), url.getAuthority(), url.getPath(), url.getQuery(), url.getRef());
        } catch (URISyntaxException e1) {
            e1.printStackTrace();
        }

Answer 1

Try using URLDecoder class,

        URL url = null;
        URI uri = null;
        String checkUrl = "http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/3/c/63c1d527-9d7e-4fd6-9867-fd0632066740/kinect_qsg%20premium_bndl_en-fr-es.pdf"; 
        try {
            url = new URL(URLDecoder.decode(checkUrl,"UTF-8"));
        } catch (MalformedURLException e1) {
            e1.printStackTrace();
        } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e1) {
            e1.printStackTrace();
        }
        try {
            uri = new URI(url.getProtocol(), url.getAuthority(), url.getPath(), url.getQuery(), url.getRef());
            System.out.println(uri.getHost());
        } catch (URISyntaxException e1) {
            e1.printStackTrace();
        }

The class path for the class is java.net.URLDecoder