HttpServlet Request getParameter automatic converting

I am having the following issue with getParameter method of HttpServletRequest. I have a JSP which is a for musing POST method. One of the form elements is a radio button that has an ASCII value for a comma, , for its value. For example, <input type="radio" name="radioName" value="Yes, more than 60 days ago" />Yes, more than 60 days ago. When I do a request.getParameter("radioName"); on this the , is converted into an actual comma. Any ideas where exactly this is happening and why and is there anything I can do about this. This happens both on Tomcat and WSAD 5.0?

Thanks

Hey Jeremy-
Welcome to the JavaRanch! We've got the perflect place for servlet-y questions like this. So I'm going to move this to the Servlets forum. Please continue the conversation there.

As for your question -->
Check out the URLDecoder class. I think it will do the kind of thing you need. It's happening so that the character doesn't get corrupted.

The standard format for URL's with parameters is like this:
blah.com/somepage.jsp?param1=value1¶m2=value2

But what if the value you were sending actually contained a "&" like "Bonnie & Clyde" That could get pretty messy, your request would look like this:

blah.com/somepage.jsp?hero=Davey+Crocket&villain=Bonnie+&+Clyde

How would the application server know that the "&" inside "Bonnie+&+Clyde" was actually part of the value and not a marker to deliniate the next set of name / value pairs?? The solution is to encode all the param names and values with those funky %XX codes so no one gets confused. Make Sense?

Thanks for your reply.
I want to correct something in my original posting The radio button code that I am using is actually <input type="radio" name="radioName" value="Yes, more than 60 days ago" />Yes, more than 60 days ago. The , is getting converted to a regular comma when I do a request.getParameter as in elementValue = request.getParameter(pageElementName);. I tried using the URLDecoder as you suggested and it still didn't work. I am using JDK 1.3 (I have no control over it). as in:
elementValue = request.getParameter(pageElementName);
String decoded = URLDecoder.decode(elementValue);

Any other ideas

o -- so you WANT it to stay in the format "Yes, more than 60 days ago" -- and NOT be converted into "Yes, more than 60 days ago" -- right?

I think getParameter() converts things into the normal non-URL encoded format as a convenience....

So, if you'd like to access the raw data, use: request.getQueryString() -- but then its your responsibility to break it up into parameter names and values. But that should be pretty doable with the String.split() method.
[ September 01, 2004: Message edited by: Jessica Sant ]

Or you could presumably just re-encode it with java.net.URLEncoder.encode(elementValue, "UTF-8"), but then you'd get the pluses for spaces, etc. If you don't want the whole thing encoding you could just use String.replace() for the comma.

Thanks for your responses. THey were a big help