HttpURLConnection and the killer Pound (#)

Question

I'm trying to create a part of my application that posts data to an ASP page (on an affiliate's web site).
Originally, I was using the following code to post the data:
URL url = new URL(sPostURL);                    
HttpURLConnection conn = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
conn.setRequestMethod("POST");
conn.setRequestProperty("Content-Type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
conn.setDoInput(true);
conn.setDoOutput(true);
conn.setUseCaches(false);
// include fields to post
conn.setRequestProperty("address", sAddress);
conn.setRequestProperty("ste/apt#", sApt);
DataOutputStream dos = new DataOutputStream(conn.getOutputStream() );
dos.writeBytes("");
dos.close();
// Retrieve response
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(conn.getInputStream()));
String sNewLine = in.readLine();
String sResp = "";
while (sNewLine != null) {
  sResp += sNewLine;
  sNewLine = in.readLine();
in.close();Which worked at first, but then when I went back to the code, I must have made a change because it no longer seems to post the data (sAddress and sApt) to the page. So after researching the topic in the forums, I switched to using a tokenized string to store my post data:
URL url = new URL(sPostURL);                    
HttpURLConnection conn = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
conn.setRequestMethod("POST");
conn.setRequestProperty("Content-Type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
conn.setDoInput(true);
conn.setDoOutput(true);
conn.setUseCaches(false);
DataOutputStream dos = new DataOutputStream(conn.getOutputStream() );
// include fields to post
String sRequest = "&address=" + sAddress; // BUILD DATA STRING (NEW)
sRequest += "&ste/apt#=" + sApt; // BUILD DATA STRING (NEW)
dos.writeBytes("");
dos.close();
// Retrieve response
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(conn.getInputStream()));
String sNewLine = in.readLine();
String sResp = "";
while (sNewLine != null) {
  sResp += sNewLine;
  sNewLine = in.readLine();
in.close();which posts the data fine, but the pound sign (#) causes the server to return a response code 500. I can't find an easy way to escape the pound sign. I've even tried building the string using the URL encoded value (%23) but it still causes problems. Does anyone have any suggestions? Was I correct in abandoning the first method? if anyone has any guidance I would be very grateful.

Answer 1

I think the first method is more clean, but if you want to use the second one, you should put your request string through a URLEncoder to encode the string first.
--lichu