URL Encoder & Decoder – encode and decode URLs online

Only a few characters are allowed in a URL. All others are written as % followed by two hexadecimal digits for each byte of the character in UTF-8. A space becomes %20, “ä” becomes %C3%A4 (two bytes), “€” becomes %E2%82%AC (three bytes) and an emoji like 😀 becomes %F0%9F%98%80 (four bytes). This is also called percent encoding or URL encoding, often shortened by developers to URL encode; reversing it is URL decode.

%20 is an encoded space: 20 is the hexadecimal value of a space. Likewise, %3D stands for =, %26 for &, %2F for / and %2C for a comma. %20 works anywhere in a URL. Using + for a space is only valid in form encoding (application/x-www-form-urlencoded), such as query strings generated by an HTML form. In a path, + is an actual plus sign. “Käse & Brot” becomes “K%C3%A4se+%26+Brot” as a form value and “K%C3%A4se%20%26%20Brot” with encodeURIComponent. When decoding, choose the appropriate option: “Form” for data from forms and searches.

encodeURI leaves URL separators unchanged: ; , / ? : @ & = + $ #. encodeURIComponent encodes them too. With encodeURI, “a/b?c=d” stays “a/b?c=d”; with encodeURIComponent, it becomes “a%2Fb%3Fc%3Dd”. Use encodeURI for a complete address. Use encodeURIComponent for an individual value inserted into a URL; otherwise, an & or = in the value could break the parameters.

Select “Decode” and paste the encoded URL or text above. “M%C3%BCller%20%26%20S%C3%B6hne” becomes “Müller & Söhne”. For a URL, the tool also breaks the address into components such as scheme, host, path, query and fragment. It displays query parameters in a table with their name, decoded value and raw value—for example, q = green Tomaten instead of gr%C3%BCne%20Tomaten. Parameters follow the ?, names and values are joined by =, and multiple parameters are separated by &. For data from a form or search, select “Form” so + is read as a space in the result.

The letters A to Z and a to z, the digits 0 to 9 and the characters -_.~ remain unchanged; only form encoding encodes the tilde as %7E. The delimiters : / ? # [ ] @ ! $ & ' ( ) * + , ; = are allowed only in their respective roles, such as & between two parameters. Characters that must be encoded include spaces, quotation marks, %, < > ^ { | } and all non-ASCII characters, such as umlauts and emojis. encodeURIComponent also leaves ! * ' ( ) unchanged, while strict RFC 3986 encoding encodes those too. The character table above shows the results for the most common special characters.

You don’t include them directly: they’re encoded. Letters such as “ä”, “ß”, “é”, “ñ” and “å” each occupy two bytes in UTF-8: “ä” becomes %C3%A4, “ß” becomes %C3%9F, “é” becomes %C3%A9, “ñ” becomes %C3%B1 and “å” becomes %C3%A5. A space becomes %20, or + in form encoding. Browsers often display the address in readable form and encode it only when sending it. For links you write yourself, encode the value with encodeURIComponent or this tool. The “What happens to your characters” table shows the Unicode code points and bytes of replaced characters. Umlauts in domain names aren’t percent-encoded; they’re converted using Punycode (müller.de becomes xn--mller-kva.de), which this tool doesn’t handle.

If text that's already encoded is encoded again, % becomes %25: “%20” becomes “%2520”. You can spot this when %25 is followed by two digits and %XX sequences remain after decoding. The tool points this out and offers “Decode again”. To avoid it, encode each value exactly once, when assembling the URL.

UTF-8 is the standard today; in UTF-8, “ä” is %C3%A4. Older sites and systems may use ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1), where “ä” is %E4 and “é” is %E9. A single %E4 is invalid in UTF-8: the tool identifies its position and offers “Use ISO-8859-1.” With that character set, “K%E4se” becomes “Käse” again. Characters not available in ISO-8859-1, such as “€”, can’t be encoded with it; switch back to UTF-8 for those.

No. Encoding and decoding happen in your browser; your text is neither uploaded nor stored. This also applies to URLs containing tokens or login credentials. The tool is free and requires no sign-up.