Learn More About URL Encoding
Understand percent-encoding and RFC 3986 standards:
URL Encoder & Decoder Online
Free online URL encoder and decoder. Safely encode URLs, query parameters, and special characters, or decode percent-encoded strings back to readable text. Fast, secure, and runs locally.
How It Works
Our tool uses standard JavaScript functions (encodeURIComponent and decodeURIComponent) to convert unsafe characters into their corresponding percent-encoded format (e.g., a space becomes '%20') and vice versa.
Common Use Cases
- Encoding complex query strings or search parameters to append to a URL safely
- Decoding messy, unreadable URLs copied from a browser address bar
- Preparing data to be safely sent via an HTTP GET or POST request
- Troubleshooting broken links caused by unescaped special characters
Frequently Asked Questions
URLs can only be sent over the Internet using the ASCII character-set. Since URLs often contain characters outside the ASCII set, the URL has to be converted into a valid ASCII format. URL encoding replaces unsafe ASCII characters with a '%' followed by two hexadecimal digits.
Percent-encoding is another name for URL encoding. It is a mechanism for encoding information in a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). For example, a space is encoded as '%20'.
Yes. All encoding and decoding happens locally in your browser. No data is sent to our servers, ensuring complete privacy.
URL encoding (percent encoding) replaces unsafe characters with a % followed by two hexadecimal digits. For example, a space becomes %20 and & becomes %26.
URLs can only contain a limited set of ASCII characters. Special characters like spaces, &, ?, and # have reserved meanings in URLs and must be encoded to be used as data.
encodeURI encodes a full URL but preserves characters like :, /, and ?. encodeURIComponent encodes everything except A-Z, a-z, 0-9, and -_.!~*'(), making it suitable for query parameter values.
Both represent spaces, but in different contexts. %20 is the standard URL encoding, while + is used specifically in HTML form data (application/x-www-form-urlencoded).