Properly encoded + (plus sign encoded with %2B) still replaced with blank space in @RequestParam

[larsduelfer]

Hi all,

there are many issues here raised regarding the handling of "+" signs in URLs. Nevertheless, I understood that if they are properly encoded (replaced by %2B) they should be decoded again as a "+" and not as blank space. However, that is not the case (with Spring 5.1.8) Maybe I am still getting something wrong here but from my understanding this is not as it's supposed to be.

I have trouble using an ISO timestamp as a request parameter although I encoded the + sign with %2B.

Any help and explanations are very welcome!

Regards, Lars

[rstoyanchev]

hi @larsduelfer, it's not supposed to be, it's rather two alternatives and it depends which you want. Please review the section on URI encoding and if you still have questions please show a snippet of the code you're using.

[larsduelfer]

Hi @rstoyanchev , maybe this is a missunderstanding: I was talking about decoding not encoding.

I have a @RestController that uses a date (Date class with ISO formatting) as a request parameter (annotated using @RequestParam) When I sent a properly encoded Request to this endpoint, the date cannot be converted, since the %2B is decoded to a blank space. So when I want to use an ISO timestamp, it currently only works for timezones like -XX:XX but not for those like +XX:XX (or the properly encoded version thereof).

This is the method on my RestController:

@GetMapping
public ResponseEntity<GenericPageListWrapper<Notification>> findAll(
      @AuthenticationPrincipal User user,
      @RequestParam(required = false) @DateTimeFormat(iso = DateTimeFormat.ISO.DATE_TIME) Date before,
      @RequestParam(required = false) Integer limit) { .. }

A request with this URL works:

http://localhost:8080/v1/projects/notifications?before=2019-08-01T20:36:30.856-05:00

A request with this URL ends up with a parsing problem due to a replacement of the "+" with a blank and the same happens with the encoded version (%2B) shown below:

http://localhost:8080/v1/projects/notifications?before=2019-08-01T20:36:30.856+05:00
http://localhost:8080/v1/projects/notifications?before=2019-08-01T20:36:30.856%2B05:00

[rstoyanchev]

I've edited your comment to improve the formatting. You might want to check out this Mastering Markdown guide for future reference.

[rstoyanchev]

@RequestParam obtains the value from HttpServletRequest, there is no extra decoding involved within Spring. Have you tried just accessing this via HttpServletRequest#getParameter to see what you get?

[larsduelfer]

Hi @rstoyanchev I must appologize for causing confusion. I was chasing a phantom error here. It actually works as expected. When the URL is properly encoded, the iso timestamp is parsed and converted to Date. I don't know what happened last week so that I got confused. Thanks for your help in anyway. Regards, Lars