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Java Intro to Java Web Development with Spark Diving into Web Development Cookies

Posted by Sondre Dahl
Sondre Dahl
10,086 Points

If the username contains a whitespace character such as " ", I get a 500 internal error. Is there any way to fix this?

This is a part of the error message I get: 

[qtp694881261-17] ERROR spark.http.matching.GeneralError - 
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: RFC6265 Cookie values may not contain character: [ ]

Line where the error starts: 

at com.teamtreehouse.courses.Main.lambda$main$1(Main.java:25)

Line causing error:

res.cookie("username", username);

Example name: James Roger

1 Answer

jb30
jb30
44,805 Points
jb30
jb30
44,805 Points

You could try converting the space characters to something else, then converting them back to spaces when reading the cookie.

One way to do this would be to import java.net.URLEncoder and java.net.URLDecoder, and changing res.cookie("username", username); to res.cookie("username", URLEncoder.encode(username, "utf-8")); which would store the value of the cookie as James+Roger. To decode a non-null value of the cookie, you could use URLDecoder.decode(req.cookie("username"), "utf-8"), which would give you James Roger.