Set Authorization Header with UTF-8 in Java

Question

I am trying to perform the OAuth 1.0a authentication flow using Java. OAuth 1.0a requires "All parameter names and values [to be] escaped using the RFC3985 percent-encoding mechanism... Text names and values MUST be encoded as UTF-8 octets." I would like to use the HttpsURLConnection class and use the setRequestProperty method to add the oauth parameters to the Authentication header. However, Java internally stores strings with UTF-16 encoding. I built a method that performs the percent encoding for me, so the string "Hello World!" is successfully changed to "Hello%20World%21". Even though it follows percent-encoding, it is still internally stored in UTF-16. If I pass this string into the setRequestProperty under an arbitrary key, this would be unreadable to a server accepting UTF-8 data. How do I add UTF-8 text to an HTTP header? The setRequestProperty method takes two Strings, so no matter what, I can only pass in data stored in UTF-16. I have also converted the text data to a byte array that is in UTF-8 format, but I cannot use an array as input to the setRequestProperty.

Answer 1

You are overthinking it. The way java stores strings internally is completely irrelevant to the matter and is transparent to you as a programmer. Just set your string as a header value and it will work. I wrote my own simplified Http client based on HttpsURLConnection class and I used it it to set auth header for authentication as well as many other headers and it works just fine. Here is a Javadoc for my HttpClient and here is a GitHub page for my MgntUtils Library. There you can see the source code. Here is the HttpClient class source code. See the line 344.