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How to handle reserved character in REST API with Get request specially & for example value M&S

I have requirement to accept value as parameter in get request for value like "M&S" but by default after & it consider it as second parameter.
http://myapp:8000?param1=M&S
It still won't work as my postman collection changing as Per URL encoding
http://myapp:8000?param1=M%26S

you have to encode the parameter "&" like below
http://myapp:8000?param1=M%26S

You will have to url-encode the & character. The utf-8 code for that is %26 . So your request will have to be: http://myapp:8000?param1=M%26S

Documenting JSON in URL not possible

In my Rest API it should be possible to retrieve data which is inside a bounding box. Because the bounding box has four coordinates I want to design the GET requests in such way, that they accept the bounding box as JSON. Therefore I need to be able to send and document JSON strings as URL parameter.
The test itself works, but I can not document these requests with Spring RestDocs (1.0.0.RC1). I reproduced the problem with a simpler method. See below:
#Test public void ping_username() throws Exception
{
String query = "name={\"user\":\"Müller\"}";
String encodedQuery = URLEncoder.encode(query, "UTF-8");
mockMvc.perform(get(URI.create("/ping?" + encodedQuery)))
.andExpect(status().isOk())
.andDo(document("ping_username"));
}
When I remove .andDo(document("ping_username")) the test passes.
Stacktrace:
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Illegal character in query at index 32: http://localhost:8080/ping?name={"user":"Müller"}
at java.net.URI.create(URI.java:852)
at org.springframework.restdocs.mockmvc.MockMvcOperationRequestFactory.createOperationRequest(MockMvcOperationRequestFactory.java:79)
at org.springframework.restdocs.mockmvc.RestDocumentationResultHandler.handle(RestDocumentationResultHandler.java:93)
at org.springframework.test.web.servlet.MockMvc$1.andDo(MockMvc.java:158)
at application.rest.RestApiTest.ping_username(RestApiTest.java:65)
After I received the suggestion to encode the URL I tried it, but the problem remains.
The String which is used to create the URI in my test is now /ping?name%3D%7B%22user%22%3A%22M%C3%BCller%22%7D.
I checked the class MockMvcOperationRequestFactory which appears in the stacktrace, and in line 79 the following code is executed:
URI.create(getRequestUri(mockRequest)
+ (StringUtils.hasText(queryString) ? "?" + queryString : ""))
The problem here is that a not encoded String is used (in my case http://localhost:8080/ping?name={"user":"Müller"}) and the creation of the URI fails.
Remark:
Andy Wilkinson's answer is the solution for the problem. Although I think that David Sinfield is right and JSONs should be avoided in the URL to keep it simple. For my bounding box I will use a comma separated string, as it is used in WMS 1.1: BBOX=x1,y1,x2,y2

You haven't mentioned the version of Spring REST Docs that you're using, but I would guess that the problem is with URIUtil. I can't tell for certain as I can't see where URIUtil is from.
Anyway, using the JDK's URLEncoder works for me with Spring REST Docs 1.0.0.RC1:
String query = "name={\"user\":\"Müller\"}";
String encodedQuery = URLEncoder.encode(query, "UTF-8");
mockMvc.perform(get(URI.create("/baz?" + encodedQuery)))
.andExpect(status().isOk())
.andDo(document("ping_username"));
You can then use URLDecoder.decode on the server side to get the original JSON:
URLDecoder.decode(request.getQueryString(), "UTF-8")

The problem is that URIs have to be encoded as ACII. And ü is not a valid ASCII character, so it must be escaped in the url with % escaping.
If you are using Tomcat, you can use URIEncoding="UTF-8" in the Connector element of the server.xml, to configure UTF-8 escaping as default. If you do this, ü will be automatically converted to %C3%BC, which is the ASCII representation of the \uC3BC Unicode code-point (which represents ü).
Edit: It seems that I have missed the exact point of the error, but it is still the same error. Curly braces are invalid in a URI. Only the following characters are acceptable according to RFC 3986:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789-._~:/?#[]#!$&'()*+,;=%
So these must be escaped too.

how to pass special characters like & + % in jsp in URL

I am new to jsp.
I am taking user input(name) in a textfields. This input is saved in xml file.
I am using name attribute as a parameter and sending this parameter to another jsp file so that user can add child nodes to the given parameter.
Everything is working perfect except for & + %. I am converting parameter to httpparam so & value is %26 + value is %2B and % value is %25. / value is %2F all others are working fine.
I am having no trouble with other special characters but as I include & + % it is giving me empty value and not null in other jsp hidden fields.and thats why I am not getting any value from String name = request.getParameter("name");this statement.
Even my URL looks like jsp?name=%25 for % parameter. and ...jsp?name=%26 for & parameter
and ...jsp?name=%2B for + as a parameter
My xml file has ISO-8859-1 encoding
problem2) if I send parameter as (which is name given by user) its also empty and not null but alone < or > or >< or <> are working fine
and I can not restrict entering special characters as it is requirement
could any one help me
Thanks in advance.

Ordinarily web browsers automatically perform URL encoding on form fields, however you can perform encoding and decoding yourself using the appropriate classes. You might want to check out:
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/net/URLEncoder.html
and
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/net/URLDecoder.html

getParameter special characters

I'm trying to get an url parameter in jee.
So I have this kind of url :
http://MySite/MySite.jsp?page=recherche&msg=toto
First i tried with : request.getParameter("msg").toString();
it works well but if I try to search "c++" , the method "getParameter()" returns "c" and not "c++" and i understand.
So I tried another thing. I get the current URL and parse it to get the value of the message :
String msg[]= request.getQueryString().split("msg=");
message=msg[1].toString();
It works now for the research "c++" but now I can't search accent. What can I do ?
EDIT 1
I encode the message in the url
String urlString=Utils.encodeUrl(request.getParameter("msg"));
so for the URL : http://MySite/MySite.jsp?page=recherche&msg=c++
i have this encoded URL : http://MySite/MySite.jsp?page=recherche&msg=c%2B%2B
And when i need it, i decode the message of the URL
String decodedUrl = URLDecoder.decode(url, "ISO-8859-1");
Thanks everybody

Anything you send via "get" method goes as part of the url, which needs to be urlencoded to be valid in case it contains at least one of the reserved characters. So, any character will need to be encoded before sending.
In order to send c++, you would have to send c%2B%2B. That would be interpreted properly at the server side.
Here some reference you can check:
http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/html/topics/urlencoding.htm
Now the question is, how and where do you generate your URL? According to the language, you will need to use the proper method to encode your strings.

if I try to search "c++" , the method "getParameter()" returns "c" and not "c++"
Query parameters are treated as application/x-www-form-urlencoded, so a + character in the URL means a space character in the parameter value. If you want to send a + character then it needs to be encoded in the URL as %2B:
http://MySite/MySite.jsp?page=recherche&msg=c%2B%2B
The same applies to accented characters, they need to be escaped as the bytes of their UTF-8 representation, so été would need to be:
msg=%C3%A9t%C3%A9
(é being Unicode character U+00E9, which is C3 A9 in UTF-8).
In short, it's not the fault of this code, it's the fault of whatever component is responsible for constructing the URL on the client side.

Call your URL with
msg=c%2B%2B
+ in a URL mean 'space'. It needs to be escaped.

You need to escape special characters when passing them as URL parameters. Since + means space and & means and another parameter, these cannot be used as parameter values.
See this other S.O. question.
You may want to use the Apache HTTP client library to help you with the URL encoding/decoding. The URIUtil class has what you need.
Something like this should work:
String rawParam = request.getParameter("msg");
String msgParam = URIUtil.decode(rawParam);
Your example indicates that the data is not being properly encoded on the client side. See this JavaScript question.

Escaping & in a URL

I am using jsps and in my url I have a value for a variable like say "L & T". Now when I try to retrieve the value for it by using request.getParameter I get only "L". It recognizes "&" as a separator and thus it is not getting considered as a whole string.
How do I solve this problem?

java.net.URLEncoder.encode("L & T", "utf8")
this outputs the URL-encoded, which is fine as a GET parameter:
L+%26+T

A literal ampersand in a URL should be encoded as: %26
// Your URL
http://www.example.com?a=l&t
// Encoded
http://www.example.com?a=l%26t

You need to "URL encode" the parameters to avoid this problem. The format of the URL query string is:
...?<name>=<value>&<name>=<value>&<etc>
All <name>s and <value>s need to be URL encoded, which basically means transforming all the characters that could be interpreted wrongly (like the &) into %-escaped values. See this page for more information:
http://www.w3schools.com/TAGS/ref_urlencode.asp
If you're generating the problem URL with Java, you use this method:
String str = URLEncoder.encode(input, "UTF-8");
Generating the URL elsewhere (some templates or JS or raw markup), you need to fix the problem at the source.

You can use UriUtils#encode(String source, String encoding) from Spring Web. This utility class also provides means for encoding only some parts of the URL, like UriUtils#encodePath.