Handling special characters in REST API

Question

I am having following URL

http://context_path/info/abc/def

which gets converted like

http://context_path/info/abc%2Fdef

Where as my controller mapping is:

@RequestMapping(value = "/info/{id}", method = RequestMethod.GET)

here 'id' contains forward slash (/). So when I hit the URL I get 400 Bad Request.

I know the possible solutions

• Setting tomcat to allow forward slash.
• Use URL encoding.
• Use of @RequestParam instead of @PathVariable.

But above solution are not possible for me.

Q. Is there any other solution like (using regular expression or changing the mapping or anything else) to the problem ? Also how the tomcat treats other special characters ('.' , ''' , ':' , ',') correctly and controller gets hit but not for '/'.

Tried but not working :

1) @RequestMapping(value = "/info/{id:.*}", method = RequestMethod.GET)
2) @RequestMapping(value = "/info/{id}/**", method = RequestMethod.GET)
3) @RequestMapping(value = "/info/**", method = RequestMethod.GET)

Answer 1

It is not nice, but you can use Base64 transformation.

So you client will send an encoded id and you decode it back in your controller.

import org.apache.commons.codec.binary.Base64;

@RequestMapping(value = "/info/{id}", method = RequestMethod.GET)
public String get(@PathVariable String id) {
    final String realId = new String(new Base64(true).encodeBase64URLSafe(id));
    [...]
}

EDIT: You should use url save implementation of Base64:

• javascript: js-base64
• java: Base64 from Apache Commons
• Is it ok to remove newline in Base64 encoding