URL Encode and Decode

How to use it

Paste text and press Encode or Decode. Pick the mode first:

• Component (default) encodes everything except letters, digits and - _ . ~. Use it for a single query parameter value, a path segment, or anything you insert into a URL. It is equivalent to JavaScript's encodeURIComponent, plus encoding of ! ' ( ) * for strict RFC 3986 output.
• Full URL keeps characters that give a URL its structure, such as : / ? # & =, and only encodes spaces and other unsafe characters. Use it to clean up a complete URL that contains spaces or non-ASCII letters. It matches encodeURI.

Tick Spaces as + if you work with HTML form data (application/x-www-form-urlencoded), where a space is written as + instead of %20. When decoding with this option on, + is turned back into a space.

Worked example

You want to link to a search for café & bar. Inserting it raw breaks the URL, because & starts a new parameter. In Component mode the value becomes:

caf%C3%A9%20%26%20bar

so the final link is https://example.com/search?q=caf%C3%A9%20%26%20bar. Notice that é becomes two bytes, %C3%A9: URLs encode the UTF-8 bytes of a character, not the character itself.

Decoding works the other way: paste https://example.com/?city=K%C3%B6ln&q=a%2Bb in Component mode and you get https://example.com/?city=Köln&q=a+b.

Common characters and their encoding

Common errors

• "% is not followed by two hex digits": a literal percent sign, as in 50% off, was never encoded. Encoded, it should be %25. The error message tells you the position.
• "Bytes do not form valid UTF-8": the text was encoded in an older character set such as Latin-1, where é is %E9 rather than %C3%A9. Modern browsers and servers expect UTF-8.
• Double encoding: if you see %2520, a space was encoded twice (%20 and then the % again as %25). Decode twice, and fix the code that encodes it a second time.
• Plus signs turning into spaces: some servers decode + as a space in query strings. Encode a literal plus as %2B to be safe.