URL Decoder & Encoder

What is URL encoding?

URL encoding is the process of converting characters that aren't allowed in a URL — or that have a special meaning inside one — into a format that every browser, server, and application can transmit safely. A URL can only contain a limited set of ASCII characters: letters, digits, and a small handful of punctuation marks such as - _ . ~. Anything outside that set, including spaces, accented letters, punctuation like & or =, and characters from non-Latin alphabets, has to be represented differently before it can travel inside a URL without being misread or truncated.

This matters constantly in ordinary web use. A search box that lets someone type "café menu" needs to turn that phrase into something a server can parse as a single query value, not two separate words split by a raw space, and not a string that breaks because of an accented letter. URL encoding is what makes that translation possible.

What is URL decoding?

URL decoding is the reverse operation: taking a percent-encoded string, such as the one produced above, and converting it back into the original, human-readable text. When a server receives a request, it decodes the URL to recover the real values a person or application intended to send — the actual search term, the actual file name, the actual parameter value.

Decoding is just as common as encoding in everyday development work. Log files, browser address bars, API responses, and shared links frequently show encoded values, and being able to decode a URL quickly is often the fastest way to understand what a link actually points to or what data a request actually carries.

How percent-encoding works

Both operations rely on the same underlying system: percent-encoding, sometimes called URL encoding for short. Each character that can't appear literally in a URL is replaced with a percent sign (%) followed by its two-digit hexadecimal byte value. A space becomes %20, an ampersand (&) becomes %26, and an equals sign (=) becomes %3D. Characters outside the basic ASCII range — accented letters, symbols, and characters from other scripts — are first converted to their UTF-8 byte sequence, and each byte in that sequence is then percent-encoded, which is why a single accented character like é can turn into multiple percent codes (%C3%A9).

A handful of encoded characters come up so often that it's worth memorizing them: %20 for a space (or + inside a query string), %2F for a forward slash, %3F for a question mark, %23 for a hash or fragment symbol, %26 for an ampersand, and %25 for a literal percent sign itself. Recognizing these on sight makes it much faster to read an encoded URL without running it through a tool at all.

Encoding query parameters and full URLs

Query parameters need particular care, because the characters that separate them — ?, &, and = — are meaningful to the URL structure itself. If a parameter's value contains one of these characters unencoded, the URL is parsed incorrectly: an "&" inside a value looks like the start of a new parameter, and a raw "=" looks like an assignment. Encoding just the value, while leaving the surrounding ?, &, and = characters alone, keeps the URL structurally correct while safely carrying arbitrary text inside it.

Encoding a complete URL is a related but different task: every reserved character in the URL — including the slashes in the path and the colon after the scheme — gets encoded, which is useful when an entire URL needs to be embedded as a single value inside another URL's query string, for example when building a redirect or a sharing link.

URL encoding vs. URL decoding: what's the difference

The two operations are exact inverses of each other. URL encoding takes readable text and produces a percent-encoded string that is safe to place inside a URL. URL decoding takes that percent-encoded string and reconstructs the original readable text. Encoding is what you do before sending data in a URL; decoding is what you, or a server, do after receiving one. Running a piece of text through encode and then decode should return exactly the original text — a good way to sanity-check a URL is correct.

How to use this URL encoder and decoder

Choose Encode or Decode using the switch above the tool, then paste text into the input box on the left. The result appears instantly in the box on the right as you type — there's no button to press and no page reload. Use Copy to place the result on your clipboard, Clear to empty the input, and the swap icon to move the result back into the input if you want to reverse the operation. The character counter beneath each box makes it easy to confirm nothing was accidentally truncated.

Common URL encoding examples

A few patterns come up again and again. A space becomes %20 (or a + sign in a form-encoded query string). An ampersand inside a value becomes %26 so it isn't mistaken for a parameter separator. An email address used as a parameter value has its @ symbol encoded as %40. Non-English text — accented letters, Cyrillic, Japanese, and other scripts — expands into several percent codes per character because of UTF-8 byte encoding. The examples further up this page walk through several of these side by side.

Common use cases for developers and everyday users

Developers reach for a URL encoder and decoder constantly: building API requests, constructing redirect and callback URLs, debugging why a query parameter isn't arriving the way it was sent, reading webhook payloads, or preparing user-generated text to be safely embedded in a link. Everyday users run into the same need in smaller ways — sharing a link that contains special characters, understanding a strange-looking URL from an email or a QR code, or fixing a broken bookmark where a space was left unencoded.

Privacy: everything happens in your browser

This tool performs every conversion locally, using JavaScript that runs on your device. The text you type is never uploaded, transmitted, logged, or stored anywhere — there is no server-side processing step at all. You can paste sensitive query strings, internal URLs, or personal data into the tool without it ever leaving your browser tab, and you can safely use it offline once the page has loaded.