URL Encoder / Decoder

Percent-encode or decode URLs and query string components.

Mode

Scope

Input

Output

The result will appear here.

Was this tool useful?

About this tool

URLs may only contain a limited set of characters. Everything else — spaces, Turkish letters, ampersands inside a value — has to be percent-encoded, which replaces the character with % followed by its byte value in hexadecimal.

The distinction that catches people out is scope. Encoding a whole URL must leave the structural characters alone, or you destroy the URL. Encoding a single query value must escape them, or a stray & silently splits your value into two parameters.

How to use it

Choose encode or decode.
Pick the scope. “Component” escapes / ? & = # as well and is what you want for one parameter value. “Full URL” keeps the structure intact.
Paste the value. The result updates as you type.
When the input parses as a URL, the breakdown underneath lists the scheme, host, path and every query parameter separately.

Examples

Encoding a query value

Component scope escapes the space and the ampersand, so the value survives as one parameter.

labels & tags

labels%20%26%20tags

Encoding a whole URL

Full-URL scope escapes the space but leaves ?, = and / alone.

https://example.com/search?q=zpl viewer

https://example.com/search?q=zpl%20viewer

Common problems

Decoding fails with a malformed-sequence error.: There is a % that is not followed by two hexadecimal digits — often a literal percent sign in the original text. It should have been encoded as %25.
Spaces come back as plus signs.: Form submissions encode spaces as +, not %20. Turn on “Treat + as a space when decoding” for those strings.
A parameter value is cut short at an ampersand.: The value was encoded with full-URL scope, so the & inside it stayed literal and started a new parameter. Use component scope for values.