handling lenient query strings

The javadoc says that query string should not be decoded by the container. However, does that mean that the string has to be exactly what the container received?

Consider the URL

[http://localhost:8080/hi?e=w%6fah](http://localhost:8080/hi?e=w%6fah) dude

It has a space in the query that really should be encoded, but most containers are lenient.

But if the query string returned is "w%6fah dude", then this makes it difficult to use this query to reform new URIs as many libraries will error if the space is passed.

However, if the query string is simply encoded it will become: "w%256fah%20dude", which is also wrong.

Should we say that any container that does lenient parsing of the query string corrects those errors in the returned query string? So in this case getQueryString will return "w%6fah%20dude"?