HTTP URL Address Encoding in Java

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My Java standalone application gets a URL (which points to a file) from the user and I need to hit it and download it. The problem I am facing is that I am not able to encode the HTTP URL address properly…

Example: 

URL:  http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/first book.pdf

java.net.URLEncoder.encode(url.toString(), "ISO-8859-1");

returns me:

http%3A%2F%2Fsearch.barnesandnoble.com%2Fbooksearch%2Ffirst+book.pdf

But, what I want is

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/first%20book.pdf

(space replaced by %20)

I guess URLEncoder is not designed to encode HTTP URLs… The JavaDoc says “Utility class for HTML form encoding”… Is there any other way to do this?

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