URL Encode & Decode Online — Free, In Your Browser

What is URL encoding?

URLs can only contain a limited set of characters. When you need to include spaces, punctuation, or non-ASCII characters (like ₹ or 中文) in a URL, they must be percent-encoded — replaced with %XX where XX is the hex value of the character, per the percent-encoding rules in RFC 3986 (URI Generic Syntax).

This tool uses encodeURIComponent and decodeURIComponent — the same functions your browser and JavaScript use internally. It correctly handles Unicode, emoji, and multi-byte characters.

Common encoded characters

• Space → %20
• & → %26
• = → %3D
• ? → %3F
• / → %2F
• # → %23
• + → %2B

Common use cases for URL encoding

Frontend developers encode query parameter values before appending them to API endpoints — a search query like "price ≥ ₹500" becomes price+%E2%89%A5+%E2%82%B9500 when passed as a URL parameter. Backend engineers decode incoming query strings to extract the original user-supplied values before processing. Content teams building UTM-tagged marketing URLs encode campaign names that contain spaces and special characters. Web scrapers decode percent-encoded URLs from sitemaps to recover human-readable page paths.

encodeURI vs encodeURIComponent — when to use which

Use encodeURI when encoding a complete URL — it preserves structural characters like /, ?, =, and & so the URL remains functional. Use encodeURIComponent when encoding a single query parameter value — it encodes everything including / and & so the value cannot accidentally break the URL structure. This tool uses encodeURIComponent, which is the safe default for parameter values. If you need to encode a full URL without breaking its structure, use encodeURI instead, available in any browser console.

Decoding garbled URLs

When you copy a URL from a browser address bar or API response and see sequences like %E2%82%B9, paste it into the decoder to see the original text (₹ in this case). Email clients and some CMS platforms double-encode URLs, turning %20 into %2520 — decode twice to recover the original. Log files from web servers typically store raw percent-encoded request paths; use this tool to decode them into readable form when debugging 404 errors caused by special characters in file paths.