URIEditor prevents configuring URIs with encoded # sign

[AdrianDiemerDev]

I have a ConfigurationProperties class containing a property of type java.net.URI.

If I configure a value of file:///C:/some/path/with/#/in/it it (correctly) gets converted to a URI with a fragment component (which is not what I need in this case).
However, if I configure the value as a correctly encoded URI like this file:///C:/some/path/with/%23/in/it, It (incorrectly) gets converted to this URI: file:///C:/some/path/with/%2523/in/it.

I don't see a way to configure this URI so it gets bound corrrectly.

The reason for this is that the org.springframework.beans.propertyeditors.URIEditor tries to guess which part of the URI is correctly encoded and which isn't which is a task that's impossible to do correctly for all cases.

This has been improved upon several times #10673, #21123, #11743 but I think the approach is fundamentally flawed and the URIEditor should just not try to fix incorrectly encoded URIs by default.

The best workaround I could find was to use URLs instead of URIs.

[rstoyanchev]

To handle an encoded URI, the encode property should be off. This works:

String s = "file:///C:/some/path/with/%23/in/it";
URI uri = new URIEditor(true).createURI(s);
assertThat(uri.toString()).isEqualTo(s);

[AdrianDiemerDev]

Yes, I know about the constructor but that doesn't help with the ConfigurationProperties binding because the binding uses a hard coded instance of URIEditor with encode = false. I couldn't find any way to replace that instance.

But even if it is somehow possible to replace it there, I don't think interpreting RFC3986 compliant URIs erroneously should be the default. I get that the idea is to make it more tolerant to wrongly encoded URIs but I don't think that should go at the expense of supporting correct URIs.

Though, I have no idea how to change this without introducing a breaking change...