URL Encoder Decoder

How to Use the URL Encoder Decoder

1. Choose Encode or Decode.
2. Type the text or paste the encoded URL.
3. Pick component, full URL or form encoding.
4. Read the result, copy it, and check the parsed URL parts below.

Choose Encode to make text safe for a URL, or Decode to turn percent-encoded text back into readable characters. When encoding, pick the type that matches where the text will go. Component is for a single query value or path segment and encodes everything except letters, digits and - _ . ! ~ * ' ( ). Full URL keeps the characters that give a URL its structure, such as : / ? & = #. Form data follows the HTML form format, where spaces become plus signs.

When decoding, leave Decode + as a space on for query strings and form posts, and turn it off for paths, where a plus sign is a literal plus. If the input or output is a complete URL, the panel breaks it into scheme, host, path, each decoded query parameter and the fragment. The tool runs locally in your browser.

How Percent-Encoding Works

URLs may only contain a limited set of ASCII characters. RFC 3986 defines how to carry anything else: convert the character to UTF-8 bytes, then write each byte as a percent sign followed by two hexadecimal digits.

Worked Example

Encode Café & crème brûlée / 50% off? as a component. The accented letters become two bytes each, the spaces become %20, the ampersand %26, the slash %2F, the percent sign %25 and the question mark %3F:

As form data the spaces become + instead: Caf%C3%A9+%26+cr%C3%A8me+br%C3%BBl%C3%A9e+%2F+50%25+off%3F. Decoding %E2%9C%93+done with plus as space gives ✓ done.

Common Percent-Encoded Characters

Component or Full URL?

Use component encoding for each piece you insert into a URL, such as a search term in ?q=. If you used full URL encoding on a value containing &, the ampersand would stay raw and split your parameter in two. Use full URL encoding only on a complete address that is already correctly structured, for example to escape spaces and accented letters in a path. In JavaScript these match encodeURIComponent() and encodeURI(); in PHP, rawurlencode() matches component encoding and urlencode() matches form data.

Troubleshooting

• %2520 in a link means a value was encoded twice: %25 is the encoded percent sign. Decode twice to recover the text.
• Plus signs turning into spaces is correct for query strings. Encode a real plus as %2B.
• Malformed sequences such as a lone %, or bytes that are not valid UTF-8, are reported with their position.
• Domain names with accents use Punycode (xn--), a different system from percent-encoding.

Reserved and Unreserved Characters

RFC 3986 splits URL characters into two groups. Unreserved characters, the letters A to Z and a to z, the digits 0 to 9 and - . _ ~, never need encoding. Reserved characters such as : / ? # [ ] @ ! $ & ' ( ) * + , ; = have special meaning in a URL, so they must be encoded when they are part of a value rather than structure. Every other character, including spaces, quotes, accented letters and emoji, must always be percent-encoded.

URL Encoding in Code

In JavaScript, use encodeURIComponent for values, or build query strings with URLSearchParams, which applies form encoding automatically. Python uses urllib.parse.quote for paths and quote_plus or urlencode for query strings. Java has URLEncoder.encode, which produces form encoding with plus signs for spaces. Encoding values one at a time and joining them with & and = afterward avoids almost every bug.

Frameworks often encode automatically. If you pass an already encoded value to a function that encodes again, you get double encoding such as %2520. Decide on one place in your code where encoding happens, and pass raw text everywhere else.

Testing a link after encoding is simple: paste it into the decoder and check that every value comes back exactly as you wrote it.

Frequently asked questions