URL Encoder & Decoder
Encode special characters for URLs or decode percent-encoded strings back to readable text.
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What is URL Encoding?
URL encoding (also called percent-encoding) is a mechanism for converting characters that are not allowed in a URL into a format that can be transmitted over the internet. Special characters like spaces, ampersands (&), and non-ASCII characters are replaced with a percent sign (%) followed by their hexadecimal byte values.
For example, a space becomes %20, an ampersand becomes %26, and the Japanese character "東" becomes %E6%9D%B1. URL encoding is defined by RFC 3986 and is essential for building valid query strings, form submissions, and API requests.
This tool uses JavaScript's encodeURIComponent() for encoding, which encodes all characters except A-Z a-z 0-9 - _ . ~ ! * ' ( ). For decoding, it uses decodeURIComponent() to restore the original text.