URL Encoder & Decoder

URLs can only contain a limited set of characters — letters (A–Z, a–z), digits (0–9), and a small set of special characters (-._~). Any other character must be "percent-encoded" (also called URL encoding) to be safely transmitted as part of a URL. Our URL Encoder/Decoder handles both directions instantly, making it an essential tool for web developers, API developers, and SEO professionals.

Understanding URL encoding

URL encoding converts special characters into a format that can be safely included in a URL. Each character is replaced by a percent sign followed by two hexadecimal digits representing the character's ASCII or UTF-8 code. For example: - Space → %20 (or + in form data) - & → %26 - # → %23 - = → %3D - Arabic letters → multi-byte UTF-8 sequences like %D8%A7

This is why you sometimes see URLs like: `https://example.com/search?q=hello%20world&category=web%20development`

When do you need URL encoding?

*Building API requests:* When constructing query string parameters programmatically, values must be URL-encoded to avoid breaking the URL structure. A parameter value containing & or = would prematurely end the parameter.

*Creating links with special characters:* URLs with spaces, quotes, or international characters must be encoded to work correctly across all browsers and servers.

*Debugging encoded URLs:* When you receive a complex encoded URL (from logs, analytics, or API responses), decoding it instantly reveals the human-readable content.

*SEO analysis:* Search engines may encode non-ASCII characters in URLs. Decoding these helps you understand what content is being indexed.

encodeURI vs encodeURIComponent Our tool supports two JavaScript encoding modes: - *encodeURI:* Encodes a complete URL, preserving structural characters (:, /, ?, #, &, =) that have special meaning in URL structure - *encodeURIComponent:* Encodes a URL component (a parameter value), encoding ALL characters that could break URL structure including :, /, ?, #, &, =

For encoding parameter values, always use encodeURIComponent. For encoding a full URL path, use encodeURI.

International URLs and Unicode Modern URLs can contain Unicode characters (Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, accented Latin characters) using Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs). Our tool correctly handles multi-byte UTF-8 encoding for international characters, producing standards-compliant percent-encoded sequences.