Parsing query strings on Android

Question

Java EE has ServletRequest.getParameterValues().

On non-EE platforms, URL.getQuery() simply returns a string.

What's the normal way to properly parse the query string in a URL when not on Java EE?

---

<rant>

It is popular in the answers to try and make your own parser. This is very interesting and exciting micro-coding project, but I cannot say that it is a good idea :(

The code snippets below are generally flawed or broken, btw. Breaking them is an interesting exercise for the reader. And to the hackers attacking the websites that use them.

Parsing query strings is a well defined problem but reading the spec and understanding the nuances is non-trivial. It is far better to let some platform library coder do the hard work, and do the fixing, for you!

</rant>

Answer 1

If you have jetty (server or client) libs on your classpath you can use the jetty util classes (see javadoc), e.g.:

import org.eclipse.jetty.util.*;
URL url = new URL("www.example.com/index.php?foo=bar&bla=blub");
MultiMap<String> params = new MultiMap<String>();
UrlEncoded.decodeTo(url.getQuery(), params, "UTF-8");

assert params.getString("foo").equals("bar");
assert params.getString("bla").equals("blub");

Answer 2

using Guava:

Multimap<String,String> parseQueryString(String queryString, String encoding) {
    LinkedListMultimap<String, String> result = LinkedListMultimap.create();

    for(String entry : Splitter.on("&").omitEmptyStrings().split(queryString)) {
        String pair [] = entry.split("=", 2);
        try {
            result.put(URLDecoder.decode(pair[0], encoding), pair.length == 2 ? URLDecoder.decode(pair[1], encoding) : null);
        } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
            throw new RuntimeException(e);
        }
    }

    return result;
}

Answer 3

I don't think there is one in JRE. You can find similar functions in other packages like Apache HttpClient. If you don't use any other packages, you just have to write your own. It's not that hard. Here is what I use,

public class QueryString {

 private Map<String, List<String>> parameters;

 public QueryString(String qs) {
  parameters = new TreeMap<String, List<String>>();

  // Parse query string
     String pairs[] = qs.split("&");
     for (String pair : pairs) {
            String name;
            String value;
            int pos = pair.indexOf('=');
            // for "n=", the value is "", for "n", the value is null
         if (pos == -1) {
          name = pair;
          value = null;
         } else {
       try {
        name = URLDecoder.decode(pair.substring(0, pos), "UTF-8");
              value = URLDecoder.decode(pair.substring(pos+1, pair.length()), "UTF-8");            
       } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
        // Not really possible, throw unchecked
           throw new IllegalStateException("No UTF-8");
       }
         }
         List<String> list = parameters.get(name);
         if (list == null) {
          list = new ArrayList<String>();
          parameters.put(name, list);
         }
         list.add(value);
     }
 }

 public String getParameter(String name) {        
  List<String> values = parameters.get(name);
  if (values == null)
   return null;

  if (values.size() == 0)
   return "";

  return values.get(0);
 }

 public String[] getParameterValues(String name) {        
  List<String> values = parameters.get(name);
  if (values == null)
   return null;

  return (String[])values.toArray(new String[values.size()]);
 }

 public Enumeration<String> getParameterNames() {  
  return Collections.enumeration(parameters.keySet()); 
 }

 public Map<String, String[]> getParameterMap() {
  Map<String, String[]> map = new TreeMap<String, String[]>();
  for (Map.Entry<String, List<String>> entry : parameters.entrySet()) {
   List<String> list = entry.getValue();
   String[] values;
   if (list == null)
    values = null;
   else
    values = (String[]) list.toArray(new String[list.size()]);
   map.put(entry.getKey(), values);
  }
  return map;
 } 
}

Answer 4

Guava's Multimap is better suited for this. Here is a short clean version:

Multimap<String, String> getUrlParameters(String url) {
        try {
            Multimap<String, String> ret = ArrayListMultimap.create();
            for (NameValuePair param : URLEncodedUtils.parse(new URI(url), "UTF-8")) {
                ret.put(param.getName(), param.getValue());
            }
            return ret;
        } catch (URISyntaxException e) {
            throw new RuntimeException(e);
        }
    }

Answer 5

Based on the answer from BalusC, i wrote some example-Java-Code:

    if (queryString != null)
    {
        final String[] arrParameters = queryString.split("&");
        for (final String tempParameterString : arrParameters)
        {
            final String[] arrTempParameter = tempParameterString.split("=");
            if (arrTempParameter.length >= 2)
            {
                final String parameterKey = arrTempParameter[0];
                final String parameterValue = arrTempParameter[1];
                //do something with the parameters
            }
        }
    }

Answer 6

Use Apache HttpComponents and wire it up with some collection code to access params by value: http://www.joelgerard.com/2012/09/14/parsing-query-strings-in-java-and-accessing-values-by-key/