Java library for URL encoding if necessary (like a browser)

What every web developer must know about URL encoding

Url Encoding Explained

Why do I need URL encoding?

The URL specification RFC 1738 specifies that only a small set of characters 
can be used in a URL. Those characters are:

A to Z (ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ)
a to z (abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz)
0 to 9 (0123456789)
$ (Dollar Sign)
- (Hyphen / Dash)
_ (Underscore)
. (Period)
+ (Plus sign)
! (Exclamation / Bang)
* (Asterisk / Star)
' (Single Quote)
( (Open Bracket)
) (Closing Bracket)

How does URL encoding work?

All offending characters are replaced by a % and a two digit hexadecimal value 
that represents the character in the proper ISO character set. Here are a 
couple of examples:

$ (Dollar Sign) becomes %24
& (Ampersand) becomes %26
+ (Plus) becomes %2B
, (Comma) becomes %2C
: (Colon) becomes %3A
; (Semi-Colon) becomes %3B
= (Equals) becomes %3D
? (Question Mark) becomes %3F
@ (Commercial A / At) becomes %40

Simple Example:

import java.util.logging.Level;
import java.util.logging.Logger;
import javax.script.ScriptEngine;
import javax.script.ScriptEngineManager;
import javax.script.ScriptException;

public class TextHelper {
    private static ScriptEngine engine = new ScriptEngineManager()
        .getEngineByName("JavaScript");

/**
 * Encoding if need escaping %$&+,/:;=?@<>#%
 *
 * @param str should be encoded
 * @return encoded Result 
 */
public static String escapeJavascript(String str) {
    try {
        return engine.eval(String.format("escape(\"%s\")", 
            str.replaceAll("%20", " "))).toString()
                .replaceAll("%3A", ":")
                .replaceAll("%2F", "/")
                .replaceAll("%3B", ";")
                .replaceAll("%40", "@")
                .replaceAll("%3C", "<")
                .replaceAll("%3E", ">")
                .replaceAll("%3D", "=")
                .replaceAll("%26", "&")
                .replaceAll("%25", "%")
                .replaceAll("%24", "$")
                .replaceAll("%23", "#")
                .replaceAll("%2B", "+")
                .replaceAll("%2C", ",")
                .replaceAll("%3F", "?");
    } catch (ScriptException ex) {
        Logger.getLogger(TextHelper.class.getName())
            .log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex);
        return null;
    }
}

Use the java java.net.URLEncoder#encode():

String page = "space test";
String ecodedURL = "http://localhost:9000/" + URLEncoder.encode(page, "UTF-8");

Note: encoding the complete URL would result in an undesired situation, for example http:// encodes in http%3A%2F%2F!

Edit: to prevent encoding an URL twice you could check whether the URL contains a % as it is only valid for encodings. But if a user wrongly messes up the encodings (like, only encode the URL partially or use a % in an URL without it being used for encoding something) then there is not much to do using this method...