URL Encode & Decode

This tool encodes text so it can be used safely inside a web address, and decodes percent-encoded URLs back into readable text. URLs are only allowed to contain a limited set of characters, so anything outside that set, including spaces, ampersands, question marks, slashes used as data, accented letters and other symbols, must be converted into a safe form called percent-encoding, where each disallowed character is replaced by a percent sign followed by its character code. This is why you see things like %20 for a space or %26 for an ampersand in web links. Getting this right matters whenever you build a link, pass data in a query string, or work with APIs and web requests, because an unencoded special character can break the URL or change its meaning. This tool handles both directions. You paste your text and choose to encode or decode, and the calculator converts it instantly: encoding turns spaces and special characters into their percent-encoded form, ready to drop into a URL, while decoding reverses the process to recover the original readable text. It handles full Unicode correctly through UTF-8, so accented characters, macrons and emoji survive the round trip. Everything runs in your browser, so your text is never uploaded. Use it to build query strings, to debug a URL that is not working, to read an encoded link, or to prepare data for an API request. The encoding used is the component encoding, which is the right choice for individual values such as a single query parameter, because it encodes the special characters that separate parts of a URL. If you paste a malformed encoded string when decoding, the tool will tell you rather than produce garbled output.

Uses component encoding (encodeURIComponent), right for individual query values. Handles full Unicode via UTF-8. Runs entirely in your browser; nothing is uploaded.