What is the idiomatic way to compose a URL or URI in Java?

Question

How do I build a URL or a URI in Java? Is there an idiomatic way, or libraries that easily do this?

I need to allow starting from a request string, parse/change various URL parts (scheme, host, path, query string) and support adding and automatically encoding query parameters.

Answer 1

As of Apache HTTP Component HttpClient 4.1.3, from the official tutorial:

public class HttpClientTest {
public static void main(String[] args) throws URISyntaxException {
    List<NameValuePair> qparams = new ArrayList<NameValuePair>();
    qparams.add(new BasicNameValuePair("q", "httpclient"));
    qparams.add(new BasicNameValuePair("btnG", "Google Search"));
    qparams.add(new BasicNameValuePair("aq", "f"));
    qparams.add(new BasicNameValuePair("oq", null));
    URI uri = URIUtils.createURI("http", "www.google.com", -1, "/search",
                                 URLEncodedUtils.format(qparams, "UTF-8"), null);
    HttpGet httpget = new HttpGet(uri);
    System.out.println(httpget.getURI());
    //http://www.google.com/search?q=httpclient&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=
}
}

Edit: as of v4.2 URIUtils.createURI() has been deprecated in favor of URIBuilder:

URI uri = new URIBuilder()
        .setScheme("http")
        .setHost("www.google.com")
        .setPath("/search")
        .setParameter("q", "httpclient")
        .setParameter("btnG", "Google Search")
        .setParameter("aq", "f")
        .setParameter("oq", "")
        .build();
HttpGet httpget = new HttpGet(uri);
System.out.println(httpget.getURI());