URL Encoder / Decoder

Safely encode URL parameters or decode messy web addresses back to plain text.

String to Encode

Result

What does URL Encoding actually do?

If you've ever looked at a web address and noticed a bunch of weird characters like %20 or %3F packed into the link, you were looking at a URL-encoded string. It looks like absolute gibberish, but it's actually a very strict internet standard.

You see, URLs (web addresses) can only be sent over the internet using a specific, limited set of standard ASCII characters. You can't put a raw space, a question mark, an ampersand (&), or any special symbols (like emojis) directly into a URL. If you try, web browsers and servers will get incredibly confused and usually break the link.

URL encoding solves this by translating those "unsafe" characters into a format that the internet understands. It does this by replacing the unsafe character with a "%" followed by two hexadecimal digits. The most famous example is the humble space bar, which gets translated into %20.

Why do developers need a decoder?

While browsers read those percentage signs just fine, humans certainly don't. Have you ever tried to copy a link from a Google search or an Amazon product page to text to a friend, only to find the link is 300 characters long and looks like an alien wrote it?

That's where a URL Decoder comes in handy. If you paste that massive, messy string into our decoder, it will instantly translate all those %20 symbols back into normal spaces, and %2F back into forward slashes. This lets you see the actual text, read the parameters of an API call, or clean up a link before sharing it.

How to use this tool

I designed this to be a simple, two-way street.

  • To Encode: Make sure the tool is set to "Encode". Paste your normal, human-readable text or full URL into the left box, and hit the button. It will spit out a web-safe, browser-ready string on the right.
  • To Decode: Click the "Switch to Decode" button. Paste the messy, percentage-filled URL into the left box. Hit the button, and it will strip away the encoding, giving you the clean text back.

Because this tool runs entirely on JavaScript right in your browser window, it's incredibly fast and completely secure. We never log the URLs you are encoding or decoding.