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URL Encoder/Decoder

Encode and decode URLs and query strings to handle special characters safely in web addresses.

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📋 How to Use

  1. Choose Encode or Decode mode.
  2. For encoding: paste the URL or text containing special characters.
  3. For decoding: paste the percent-encoded URL string.
  4. Click Encode/Decode — results appear instantly.
  5. Copy the encoded or decoded URL to use in your application or browser.

About This Tool

URL Encoder & Decoder — Handle Special Characters in URLs

URLs can only contain a limited set of ASCII characters. When URLs contain special characters like spaces, accents, symbols, or non-ASCII text, they must be percent-encoded. Our URL Encoder & Decoder converts any text to URL-safe format and decodes encoded URLs back to readable form.

What Is URL Encoding?

URL encoding (also called percent-encoding) replaces unsafe characters with a % followed by their two-digit hexadecimal ASCII code:

  • Space → %20 (or + in form data)
  • & → %26
  • = → %3D
  • ? → %3F
  • # → %23
  • é → %C3%A9
  • 中 → %E4%B8%AD

When Is URL Encoding Needed?

  • Query parameters: Special characters in URL query strings must be encoded to prevent misinterpretation by servers and browsers.
  • Form submission: Form data with spaces and special characters is URL-encoded before transmission.
  • REST APIs: Passing structured data in URL paths and parameters.
  • Redirect URLs: URLs used as parameter values in other URLs must be fully encoded.
  • Internationalized URLs (IDN): Non-ASCII domain names and paths.

Encoder Options

  • Full URL encoding: Encode the entire URL including path, query, and fragment.
  • Component encoding: Encode only query parameter values (preserving URL structural characters like /, ?, &, =).
  • Form encoding: Use + for spaces instead of %20 (as used in HTML form submission).

Decoder Features

  • Decode percent-encoded URLs back to human-readable form.
  • Handle both %20 and + as space characters.
  • Decode UTF-8 encoded international characters correctly.

Developer Use Cases

API development: Encode query parameters and path segments for REST API calls. Web scraping: Decode encoded URLs from web pages to readable addresses. Debugging: Decode complex encoded redirect chains to understand URL structure. Form handling: Understand how form data is encoded in POST requests.

Encode and decode URLs now — free and instant.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

Percent-encoding replaces unsafe URL characters with a % sign followed by their two-digit hexadecimal code. For example, a space becomes %20 and & becomes %26.
%20 is the standard percent-encoding for a space character in URLs. The + sign represents a space only in application/x-www-form-urlencoded format (HTML form submissions), not in general URL paths.
Letters (A-Z, a-z), digits (0-9), and the characters - _ . ~ are "unreserved" and safe in URLs without encoding. All other characters should be percent-encoded.
Non-ASCII characters are first encoded to UTF-8 bytes, then each byte is percent-encoded. For example, the letter é (U+00E9) becomes %C3%A9.
encodeURIComponent() encodes all characters except A-Z, a-z, 0-9, -, _, ., !, ~, *, ', (, ). It is used to encode individual URL components like query parameter values.
Yes. The decoder handles the entire URL and decodes all percent-encoded sequences, including those representing UTF-8 multi-byte characters.

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