URL Encoder / Decoder

How percent-encoding works

URLs can only safely contain a limited set of ASCII characters; everything else — spaces, diacritics, reserved punctuation used as data rather than structure — must be percent-encoded as %XX, where XX is the byte's hexadecimal value in UTF-8. This tool uses the browser's native encodeURIComponent/decodeURIComponent, so behavior matches exactly what every browser and server implements, with no custom escaping rules to second-guess.

Component vs. full-URL mode

Component mode is for a single value that will be placed inside a URL — a search term, a redirect target — and escapes every reserved character, including :/?&=. Full-URL mode (encodeURI) is for an entire URL and leaves those structural characters alone, encoding only what would otherwise break the URL, such as spaces and non-ASCII letters. Paste a URL with a query string into the input and the table below lists every key/value pair already decoded — the fastest way to inspect a long or nested query string.