💻 Developer Tools

🔗 URL Encoder/Decoder

URLs can only safely contain a limited set of characters — letters, digits and a handful of symbols — so spaces, ampersands, non-Latin characters and other reserved symbols need to be percent-encoded (like %20 for a space) before they can be used in a query string or path segment without breaking the link. This tool encodes plain text into URL-safe percent-encoded form, or decodes an already-encoded URL back into readable text.

It's useful for building query parameters by hand, debugging why a link with special characters isn't working, or reading a long encoded URL that's otherwise unreadable at a glance.

Encode Decode

Input

Output

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How to use the URL Encoder/Decoder

Choose Encode or Decode.
Paste your text or URL into the input box.
View the converted result instantly, and copy it with one click.

How URL/percent encoding works

Percent-encoding replaces each unsafe or reserved character with a '%' followed by its two-digit hexadecimal byte value — for example, a space becomes %20 and an ampersand becomes %26. This tool uses JavaScript's standard encodeURIComponent / decodeURIComponent behaviour, which correctly handles the character set reserved for query-string components.

Frequently asked questions

Why do spaces sometimes become '+' instead of '%20'?

Both represent a space, but in different contexts: '%20' is standard percent-encoding used in URL paths, while '+' is a convention specific to the application/x-www-form-urlencoded format used in HTML form submissions and query strings. This tool uses the %20 standard form.

Do I need to encode an entire URL or just parts of it?

Typically you only need to encode the individual values you're inserting into a query string or path segment (like a search term or filename), not the structural characters of the URL itself (like :, / or ?), since encoding those would break the URL's structure.

What characters actually need encoding?

Reserved and unsafe characters — spaces, &, =, ?, #, %, and non-ASCII characters like emoji or accented letters — need encoding. Letters, digits and a small set of characters (-, _, ., ~) are considered URL-safe and are left unencoded.