URL Encoder / Decoder

The URL Encoder and Decoder converts text between its plain form and its percent-encoded (also called URL-encoded) representation, the format required whenever special characters, spaces, or non-ASCII text need to travel safely inside a URL's query string, path segment, or form submission. Type or paste a value, click encode, and every character that isn't safe in a URL — spaces, ampersands, slashes, question marks, unicode characters like accented letters or emoji — is converted into its %XX hexadecimal escape sequence. Paste an already-encoded string and decode it back to readable text just as easily. Developers reach for this tool constantly when building query parameters by hand, debugging a webhook payload, constructing a redirect URL, or figuring out why a link with an ampersand or space in it broke when pasted into an email or chat client. Marketers use it to build UTM-tagged campaign links that include spaces or special characters in campaign names. Support engineers use it to decode mysterious %20 and %2F sequences that show up in server logs so they can read the original request in plain English. Anyone integrating with a REST API that returns encoded parameters in redirect URLs will run into this regularly. It's worth understanding the difference between encodeURIComponent-style encoding, which escapes nearly every reserved character and is correct for encoding a single value that will be placed inside a query string or path segment, versus encoding an entire URL, where characters like colons, slashes, and question marks need to remain intact so the URL still parses correctly. This tool defaults to component-style encoding, which is the right choice for the vast majority of use cases like building a query string value, but keep in mind that encoding a full URL the same way will break it by escaping the scheme and path separators too. A common gotcha: the "+" character in a query string traditionally represents an encoded space in the application/x-www-form-urlencoded format used by HTML forms, which is subtly different from the %20 space encoding used elsewhere in a URL. If you're building form-submission data rather than a general URL, keep that distinction in mind, since decoding a form-encoded string incorrectly can leave stray plus signs in your text. This tool pairs well with the Base64 Encoder for encoding binary-safe data, the JSON Formatter for inspecting API payloads, and the Query String Parser style tools for breaking a full URL into its components. As with every tool here, encoding and decoding happen entirely in your browser — no URL, token, or parameter value you paste is ever sent to a server, which matters if you're debugging URLs that contain session tokens or other sensitive data.