Displaying a JSF requestLink parameter containing a + sign

Question

Strange one this. I have a tag in my JSF page which contains a parameter that contains a + sign. When the resulting hyperlink is clicked the URL converts the + sign to a space, as this is how spaces in URLs are represented.

Is there any way of encoding this parameter to display "%2b" (which is the urlencoded string) instead of +? I am using JSF 1.2

<hx:requestLink styleClass="requestLink" id="link31"
    action="#{sellingMarginBean.changeView}">
    <h:outputText styleClass="outputText" id="text81"
        value="#{varsummaryDataList.tier.description}"></h:outputText>  
    <f:param
        value="#{varsummaryDataList.tier.tierCode}"
        name="tierCode" id="param51"></f:param>
</hx:requestLink>

If I change the value of tierCode to replace any '+' with '%2b' before putting out to the screen this works, but it's a hack at best as it means creating a custom method on my Tier domain object or cycling through summaryDataList and performing the replace.

Thanks in advance

Steve

Could you post your code? What happens if you directly replace your plus signs by a `%2b` before the JSF evaluation happens? — Aritz, May 21 '14 at 06:37

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:27

According to this post by BalusC:

JSP/Servlet request: during request processing an average application server will by default use the ISO 8859-1 character encoding to URL-decode the request parameters. You need to force the character encoding to UTF-8 yourself. First this: "URL encoding" must not to be confused with "character encoding". URL encoding is merely a conversion of characters to their numeral representations in the %xx format, so that special characters can be passed through URL without any problems. The client will URL-encode the characters before sending them to the server. The server should URL-decode the characters using the same character encoding.

So probably your client and server are not using the same URL(URI)-encoding. Your best bet is to force the server itself to use UTF-8 encoding. That depends on what server you're using.

You could also use JSTL's fn:replace for your parameter, as an alternative but more "hacky" solution. Remember to define the JSTL taglib in your namespace set (xmlns:fn="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/functions").

<f:param
    value="#{fn:replace(varsummaryDataList.tier.tierCode, '+', '%2b'}"
    name="tierCode" id="param51" />

See also:

Are + signs encoded differently though? They're basic ASCII. — Evan Knowles, May 21 '14 at 09:06
@EvanKnowles, in fact, there are, but they remain in conflict with HTTP request keywords. That's why they should be encoded in a different way. — Aritz, May 21 '14 at 09:09

Displaying a JSF requestLink parameter containing a + sign

1 Answers1