I have a string in java that looks like this "''''<>!@#$%^&", this was escaped in javascript. I need to obtain the original string before escaping the special characters, which is "''''<>!@#$%^&*()".
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        Matt Ball
        
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        user3091472
        
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                    http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4841331/url-encode-and-decode-special-character-in-java – bsiamionau Dec 11 '13 at 14:33
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                    Your question has already been answered here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6138127/how-to-do-url-decoding-in-java – Michaël Benjamin Saerens Dec 11 '13 at 14:35
 
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        You can use StringEscapeUtils.unescapeHtml4 for this.
For example, the string "<Français>" will become "<Français>"
        pascalhein
        
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        You need to know how it was encoded to reverse it.
If it was URL encoded (which looks likely) then Java has a built in URLDecoder class. 
URLDecoder.decode(message, encoding);
        Tim B
        
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        Apache Commons provides utilities for this.
org.apache.commons.lang.StringEscapeUtils.unescapeHtml(String string) should be what you want.
Check out the API here
        Dragondraikk
        
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