Inexactly Comparing MediaTypes with Spring

When we're interacting with a HttpServletRequest and we want to do something based on the Accept / Content-Type header, for instance within a HandlerMethodArgumentResolver, we would lean on Spring's MediaType class to parse the string value.

But the issue is that this doesn't always work for what we want it to.

For instance, if you're expecting application/json, but receive a request with application/json;charset=UTF-8 or application/json;v=1 will not match.

Update 2021-01-11: Although the below may be helpful, it is unnecessary as MediaType provides the isCompatibleWith method for this exact reason!

The solution I've used is the below, to provide us a straightforward way to ignore parameters from the equality check:

private boolean compareMediaType(MediaType lhs, MediaType rhs) {
  if (null == lhs || null == rhs) {
    return false;
  }

  return lhs.getType().equals(rhs.getType()) && lhs.getSubtype().equals(rhs.getSubtype());
}