URL Encoder & Decoder — Free Online Tool

URL encoding and decoding explained

URLs can only contain certain characters. Special characters like spaces, ampersands, and non-ASCII characters need to be percent-encoded. This tool encodes text for safe use in URLs or decodes URL-encoded strings back to readable text.

URL encoding (percent-encoding) replaces each unsafe character with a percent sign followed by its two-digit hexadecimal ASCII value. Spaces become %20, ampersands become %26, equals signs become %3D, and non-ASCII characters like accented letters are encoded as multi-byte UTF-8 sequences. This ensures URLs conform to RFC 3986 and can be transmitted through any system.

URL encoding is necessary when constructing query parameters with user input, sharing URLs that contain special characters or non-Latin scripts, building API requests with dynamic values, creating mailto: links with pre-filled subject lines, and encoding file paths that contain spaces or special characters for web servers.

Encode only the values in query parameters, not the entire URL — encoding the ? and & delimiters would break the URL structure. Use encodeURIComponent() rather than encodeURI() when encoding individual parameters, as the latter preserves characters like & and = that have special meaning in URLs. When debugging encoded URLs, decode them first to read the actual values being sent.

Browser developer tools show encoded URLs in the Network tab, and most programming languages offer built-in encoding functions. Online decoders like urldecoder.org provide similar functionality. This tool handles both encoding and decoding with instant results, making it faster than looking up function names or opening developer tools for a quick URL debugging session.