Encoding/decoding URL issue with Tomcat 7.0.70

Problem description

We've had a couple of instances recently of customers raising issues against Tomcat 7.0.70. The problems centre around URL encoding/decoding.

For example, the request from the browser to Share is ok:
GET /share/service/components/documentlibrary/data/doclist/all/node/alfresco/user/home/Shared/test%20folder?…
But, the request from Share to the repository is badly encoded:
GET /alfresco/s/slingshot/doclib2/doclist/all/node/alfresco/user/home/Shared/test%2520folder?…ARGS… HTTP/1.1

• resulting in the answer from the repo 404 not found (It should be ‘test%20folder’ but is ‘test%2520folder’ instead)

Steps to reproduce

1. Go to Repository/Shared
2. Create a folder and name it “Test Folder” (important to put the space)
3. Once the folder is created click to enter on it
4. The screenshot shows what you will see problem.png

Additional steps for reproduction, here we see that %40 is not decoded to @

1. Create a user user with a username john-smith@alfresco.com
2. Launch the below URL and you will see the page without any problem
   http://localhost:8080/share/proxy/alfresco/api/people/john-smith%40alfresco.com/preferences

• and you will now get a "404 Not Found" error (on previous versions of Tomcat this works)
  {{"message" : "Person john-smith%40alfresco.com does not exist", }}

Analysis

For the first reproduction steps, the response is:

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Cache-Control: no-cache
Expires: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Type: application/json;charset=UTF-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2016 12:19:42 GMT

160
{
    "status" : 
  {
    "code" : 404,
    "name" : "Not Found",
    "description" : "Requested resource is not available."
  },  
  
  "message" : "Path not found: 'Shared\/test%20folder'",  
  "exception" : "",
  
  "callstack" : 
  [ 
      
  ],
  
  "server" : "Enterprise v5.1.0 (r122924-b17) schema 9,017",
  "time" : "11-Aug-2016 13:19:43"
}

Possibly caused by 59317 where it seems that Apache introduced a new control mechanism of URLs which breaks all the urls which contain spaces.