Enter the text that you wish to encode or decode:
URL encoding is generally used when the browser sends data to a web server. You can use our tool to URL encode or automatically decode a text string for global interoperability.
Step #1: Copy and paste the URL or text string you want to encode or decode.
Step 2: Encode the text: 'Reserved symbols' will be transformed into '%' symbols and two-digit hex values.
or
Decode the text: The nonsense string will be deleted and the text will be transformed into a readable format.
URL encoding and decoding, commonly known as 'percent encoding', alters a string to comply with the regulations imposed by the Uniform Resource Locator specification.
The RFC 1738 Universal Resource Locator specification dictates that only a small set of characters is often employed in a Universal Resource Locator framework.
These characters are: uppercase letters (A to Z), lowercase letters (a), digits (0 to 9), as well as various "reserved" symbols (dollar, underscore, period, closing/opening), square brackets, single quotes, asterisk , exclamation, plus sign and dash).
All offensive characters must be replaced with %, followed by the two-digit hexadecimal value represented by the symbol in the ISO character set (eg @ becomes %40); otherwise, you may experience problems when trying to pass information through a URL.
In the past, people manually encoded special characters in their encoding string. This was a tedious task that often resulted in human error. We built this tool to help you encode/decode URLs in seconds.
URL encoding refers to encoding certain characters in a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). URL encoding is a two-step process: the string is encoded into a sequence of bytes, and then each byte that is not an ASCII letter or digit is also converted to a hexadecimal byte value.
Reserved characters sometimes have special meanings and URL encoding allows them to retain their special character sequences. In other words, if a reserved character has a reserved purpose in a given context, the URL scheme dictates that it be encoded in a URL.
A URL encoding converts the character to its corresponding byte value in ASCII. This new value (two digits preceded by %) will be used in the URL instead of the reserved character.
Here is a list of reserved characters, their purpose and encoding:
character
| Character | Purpose of URL | Character encoding |
| / | Used to separate domains and directories | % 2F |
| # | Separate anchors | %23 |
| + | Indicate a space | % 2B |
| % | Indicates an encoded character | %25 |
| @ | Separate user details and pass domain | %40 |
| : | Address separate protocol | % 3B |
| <space> | Space, not recommended in URLs. | + o% 20 |
| ? | Separate query string | % 3F |
Strictly speaking, you should always encode the URL, especially if your link or text contains non-alphabetic characters, numbers, or special characters that are used outside of their normal context.
Should the URL encode unreserved characters?
Unreserved characters (upper and lower case, digits and symbols '-', '_', '.', '~') Can be encoded, but must not be encoded.