Convert string to its URL representation in Spring Framework

Question

Is there any method in Spring Framework for converting a string to its URL representation? For example from Majstrovstvá v ľadovom hokeji to majstrovstva-v-ladovom-hokeji.

take a look , u may not need spring , http://stackoverflow.com/questions/573184/java-convert-string-to-valid-uri-object — Forhad, May 13 '14 at 09:41
BTW. it's called "a slug" ([link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_URL#Slug)) — kryger, May 24 '14 at 21:41

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered May 13 '14 at 09:40

5

I don't know about Spring, but you can use URLEncoder.encode and encode for the URL (Output: Majstrovstv%C3%A1+v+%C4%BEadovom+hokeji)

Example:

String input = "Majstrovstvá v ľadovom hokeji";
System.out.println(URLEncoder.encode(input, "UTF-8"));

answered May 13 '14 at 09:40

Marco Acierno

13,987
7
40
53

The result of it is "Majstrovstv%C3%A1+v+%C4%BEadovom+hokeji", that is hard to read. I want characters like `á` to be replaced by `a`, *empty space* with `-` etc. – Chorochrondochor May 13 '14 at 10:06
You will not read it, you will use URLDecoder.decode to get the original string. – Marco Acierno May 13 '14 at 10:12
The URL would look like this http://domain.com/article/Majstrovstv%C3%A1+v+%C4%BEadovom+hokeji but I want it to look like this http://domain.com/article/majstrovstva-v-ladovom-hokeji, therefore I am looking for a method which will convert a string into the other format. Something like this http://doc.nette.org/en/2.1/strings#toc-webalize but in Java. – Chorochrondochor May 13 '14 at 11:24

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:21

Enhancing example from this answer, you could do it like this:

import java.text.Normalizer;
import java.util.regex.Pattern;

public class UrlifyString {
  public static String deAccent(String str) {
    String norm = Normalizer.normalize(str, Normalizer.Form.NFD);
    Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("\\p{InCombiningDiacriticalMarks}+");
    return pattern.matcher(norm).replaceAll("").replace(" ", "-").toLowerCase();
  }

  public static void main(String[] args) {
    System.out.println(deAccent("Majstrovstvá v ľadovom hokeji"));
  }
}

Output is:

majstrovstva-v-ladovom-hokeji

One thing to note is that it's a lossy conversion so there's no way to go back from this "simplified" form to the original version. Because of this you should not use this as a key to any of the resources, I'd suggest including a unique identifier to the articles, something like:

http://example.com/article/123/majstrovstva-v-ladovom-hokeji

Spring's @PathVariable would make it easy to handle this transparently.

Convert string to its URL representation in Spring Framework

2 Answers2