# and other special characters in querystring - JSP

[Hemaraj]

Dear Java group

I have a JSP page which has some hyperlinks that contain values such as

http://www.mydomain.com#Something1
http://www.mydomain.com#Something2

When I click on them, they should be passed as value of query string to a
servlet. When the servlet is run, I can see in url field of the browser that
the correct value was passed ; for example I see:


http://localhost:8080/MyWebSite/ShowDetails?SelectedItem=http://www.mydomain.com#Something2



Where ShowDetails is the name of the servlet that is getting this selected
item through

String Selected1 = request.getParameter("SelectedItem");



However, when I want to display this field using

out.println("<p>Value " + Selected1 + "</p>");



I only see http://www.mydomain.com - what I want to see is :
http://www.mydomain.com#Something2 - meaning, the part #something1 is not
there anymore.

How to solve this problem?

Thank you

 

[Jan =?UTF-8?B?VGhvbcOk?=]

Hi Hemaraj,

the #-part is interpreted by the browser and not sent to the server. It
might appear in the URL line, however only the part before the # will be
passed to the server. You will have to URL-encode the string that you put
into the link if you want to send that information to the server. However
then the browser will not jump to the anchors anymore. To achieve both one
could hack:

http://www.mydomain.com#Something1#Something1

You would have to create some magic servlet mapping to make that work. I
wonder, though why you would want to send the anchor part to the server in
that URL instead of adding it to a parameter:

http://www.mydomain.com?anchor=Something1#Something1

Hope that helps.

Best regards,
Jan