Java: Encoding of a mailto link with subject and plain text multiline body

Question

I´ve googled a lot, but I wasn´t able to find a solution to my problem. I need to encode a mailto: link with subject and body to UTF-8 in java.

The body consists of plain text

Is there any method which encodes:

• the whole string in UTF-8, for example Ä to %C3%84S
• blanks into %20 instead of +
• \r\n into %0D%0A
• / to %2f

Thank you for your help!

Answer 1

You want the URLEncode.encode(String s, String enc) method. The second parameter should be the string UTF-8.

It does encode spaces as + instead of %20, which is valid for query parameters; you can always just special-case that and replace all of the former with the latter. Example:

import java.net.URLEncoder;
import java.util.regex.Pattern;

public class Foobar {
  private static Pattern space = Pattern.compile("\\+");
  public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    String first = URLEncoder.encode("Ä+ \r\n/", "UTF-8");
    String second = space.matcher(first).replaceAll("%20");
    System.out.println(second);
  }
}

This outputs:

%C3%84%2B%20%0D%0A%2F