URL Encoder / Decoder

How to Use

Paste your text or URL into the box. Click Encode to convert special characters into percent-encoded form (for example a space becomes %20), or Decode to turn a percent-encoded string back into plain text. Copy the result with one click. If a string can't be decoded, the tool tells you why.

Why This Tool Is Useful

URLs can only contain a limited set of characters. Anything else — spaces, ampersands, question marks, emoji, non-Latin letters — must be percent-encoded, or the link breaks or gets misread. This tool is essential when you're building query strings, debugging API requests, handling redirect parameters, or reading an encoded URL from a log. It uses the browser's own encodeURIComponent and decodeURIComponent, so the results exactly match what your code will produce.

What Percent-Encoding Does

Percent-encoding replaces an unsafe character with a % followed by its hexadecimal byte value. A space becomes %20, an ampersand becomes %26, and so on. Multi-byte Unicode characters become several percent-encoded bytes. This keeps the URL unambiguous so servers and browsers parse it the same way.

encodeURIComponent vs encodeURI

This tool uses encodeURIComponent, which encodes reserved characters like &, =, ?, and / — the right choice when you're encoding a single value to place inside a query string or path segment. encodeURI (used for a whole URL) deliberately leaves those structural characters alone. If you're encoding one parameter value, component-encoding is what you want.

Common Places You Need It

Percent-encoding shows up constantly in web work:

• Building query strings like ?q=hello%20world.
• Passing a URL as a parameter (for OAuth redirects, for example).
• Sending form data or API request bodies.
• Reading encoded values back out of a log or analytics tool.
• Fixing links that broke because of a space or special character.

Common Characters and Their Encodings