URL Encoder / Decoder

What is URL Encoding?

URLs can only contain a limited set of characters. Letters, numbers, and a few symbols like hyphens and underscores are always safe. Characters like spaces, accented letters, ampersands, and question marks need to be encoded before being placed in a URL — otherwise they can break the link or be misinterpreted by browsers and servers.

URL encoding (also called percent-encoding) replaces unsafe characters with a % followed by two hexadecimal digits. A space becomes %20, an ampersand becomes %26, and an accented é becomes %C3%A9 in UTF-8.

Smart Auto-Detection

This tool automatically detects whether you’re encoding a complete URL or an individual value and applies the correct behavior:

• Complete URL (e.g., https://example.com/search?q=café) — structural characters like ://, ?, &, =, and / are preserved. Only unsafe and non-ASCII characters are encoded.
• Individual value (e.g., café résumé) — everything except letters, numbers, and -_.~ is encoded, including &, =, and /. This is the correct behavior when embedding a value inside a query string.

This distinction matters because encoding a full URL like a component value would destroy the URL structure, turning https:// into https%3A%2F%2F.

Available Options

Encoding

Controls how non-ASCII bytes are represented:

• UTF-8 (default) — the universal standard. Accented letters and emoji are encoded as multi-byte UTF-8 sequences (e.g., é → %C3%A9). Correct for all modern web usage.
• Form — identical to UTF-8 but encodes spaces as + instead of %20. This follows the application/x-www-form-urlencoded convention used by HTML forms.
• Latin-1 — encodes each character as a single byte. Only works for characters in the Latin-1 range (code points 0–255). Returns an error for characters outside that range.

Multiline

When enabled, each line is encoded or decoded independently. Useful for processing a list of URLs or values in bulk.

How to Use This Tool

1. Select Encode or Decode mode.
2. Paste your URL or value in the input area.
3. The result appears immediately — no button to click.
4. Use the copy button to grab the output.

Common Use Cases

• Sharing URLs with special characters: Encode a URL that contains accented letters or non-ASCII paths so it works correctly in browsers and emails.
• Building query strings: Encode individual parameter values before appending them to a URL.
• Debugging form submissions: Decode a percent-encoded form payload to read the actual values.
• Working with APIs: Many APIs require URL-encoded parameters in request bodies.
• Decoding shared links: Decode a long percent-encoded URL to understand what it’s actually pointing to.

Frequently Asked Questions