java.lang.IllegalArgumentException for url embedded with special character

Question

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Illegal character in query at index 49: http://download.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=?^NDX,^BANK&f=nsl1opc1

im getting the malformed url exception on the 'caret' (^) symbol..came to know that the caret is used heavily in regex and in other cases this character is particularly removed from a desired string.

Is this not possible to have strings/urls with 'caret' (^) symbol

In the above case to retrieve index data i need to have that symbol..

Maybe you should [encode](http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/dencoder/) the character. The code for caret is `%5E`. — mwerschy, May 26 '13 at 18:27
try encoding the url http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3286067/url-encoding-in-android — Raghunandan, May 26 '13 at 18:27

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered May 26 '13 at 18:31

2

It is indeed not legal to have a caret in a query string part.

Use the constructor for URI instead:

final URL url = new URI("http", "download.finance.yahoo.com", "/d/quotes.csv",
    "s=?^NDX,^BANK&f=nsl1opc1", null).toURL();

This will take care of all the necessary encoding issues for you.

See the Javadoc.

answered May 26 '13 at 18:31

fge

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Well, there is no reason why it should not work. Try it and see ;) – fge May 26 '13 at 18:38
Side note: if you have many URLs to build that way, one project of mine may be useful: https://github.com/fge/uri-template – fge May 26 '13 at 19:04

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException for url embedded with special character

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