Q: How does one encode query parameters to go on a url in Java?
A: java.net.URLEncoder.encode(String s, String encoding) can help too. It follows the HTML form encoding application/x-www-form-urlencoded.
URLEncoder.encode(query, "UTF-8");
On the other hand, Percent-encoding (also known as URL encoding) encodes space with %20. Colon is a reserved character, so : will still remain a colon, after encoding.
ref. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5330104/encoding-url-query-parameters-in-java