Simple way to convert a URL into a filename

Question

I'm writing an asynchronous image downloader for Android and was just wondering, given an arbitary URL such as:

http://www.android.com/images/brand/droid.gif

What would be the best way to convert the unique url to a filename. I thought about simply splitting the url and grabbing the last section, but I want the filename to be representative of the whole URL. The other alternatives I thought were replacing all the forward slashes with underscores or simply hashing the whole URL and storing this.

If anyone has any ideas I'd love to hear them!

Thanks

score 4 · Accepted Answer · edited Jul 22 '18 at 09:27

4

In case, usually uses MD5 hash. but I suggest to use 'aquery' library. In library you can simply download Image asynchronous and put it to view. It also support disk cache, memory cache simply.

edited Jul 22 '18 at 09:27

Atef Hares

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answered Jan 29 '12 at 17:49

lulumeya

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Ended up finding a few methods in aquery to do exactly what I wanted, thanks! – Ljdawson Jan 30 '12 at 03:31

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 29 '12 at 18:48

This method will be fulfill your requirements. It will generate a name which will represent original URL. You can call generateNameFromUrl(String url) method like this.

    String url = "http://www.android.com/images/brand/droid.gif";
    String uniqueName = generateNameFromUrl(url));

Method is given below:

public static String generateNameFromUrl(String url){

    // Replace useless chareacters with UNDERSCORE
    String uniqueName = url.replace("://", "_").replace(".", "_").replace("/", "_");
    // Replace last UNDERSCORE with a DOT
    uniqueName = uniqueName.substring(0,uniqueName.lastIndexOf('_'))
            +"."+uniqueName.substring(uniqueName.lastIndexOf('_')+1,uniqueName.length());
    return uniqueName;
}

Input: "http://www.android.com/images/brand/droid.gif"
Output: "http_www_android_com_images_brand_droid.gif"

Simple way to convert a URL into a filename

2 Answers2