How to Use the URL Encoder & Decoder
A URL can only safely contain a limited set of characters — letters, digits, and a few symbols like -, _, ., and ~. Anything else, including spaces, non-ASCII text, and reserved characters like &, =, ?, and #, needs to be converted into percent-encoding (a % followed by a hex code) so browsers and servers can handle it correctly.
Paste any text or URL, click Encode to convert special characters into percent-encoded form, or click Decode to turn an encoded URL back into readable text. For example, a space becomes %20, and non-ASCII characters are converted into multi-byte UTF-8 percent sequences.
This is useful when building API query strings, adding non-English search terms to a URL, or reading an encoded link someone sent you. If you try to decode a malformed string, you'll see an error — double-check that the encoded text wasn't cut off or altered.
Frequently Asked Questions
URLs can only safely contain letters, digits, and a few symbols. Characters like spaces, non-English text, or reserved symbols such as &, =, and ? can confuse servers if left as-is, so they need to be converted into %XX percent-encoded form.
Decoding fails when the input isn't valid percent-encoded text or was cut off mid-sequence. Each % must be followed by exactly two hexadecimal digits (like %EC), and a broken sequence can't be decoded correctly.