🔗 URL Encoder / Decoder

The URL Encoder / Decoder converts strings between plain text and percent-encoded form. Percent encoding is how URLs safely carry characters that would otherwise have special meaning: spaces become %20, ampersands become %26, non-ASCII letters expand into their UTF-8 byte sequences. Use this tool when you're constructing query strings by hand, debugging why a link is being mis-parsed, decoding a URL out of a log file, or building a redirect for a page with special characters in the slug.

How to Use This Tool

Paste the string you want to convert. Press Encode to produce the percent-encoded form (spaces → %20, ? → %3F, and so on). Press Decode to reverse the process and see the original string. The tool uses JavaScript's standard encodeURIComponent / decodeURIComponent, so the results match what browsers and virtually every server-side URL parser produce.

What This Tool Checks

Encoding replaces every character outside the URL-safe set (A–Z, a–z, 0–9, and a small set of unreserved punctuation) with its percent-encoded byte sequence. Decoding does the reverse. The tool is symmetrical — encode then decode returns the original string exactly.

SEO Best Practices

Encode individual query-parameter values, not the entire URL — encoding the ":" in "https://" will break the URL. When constructing a URL in code, always encode each parameter separately before joining them with "&". When you receive a URL from an untrusted source and want to display it as text, decode first, then re-escape for whatever context you're dropping it into (HTML, JSON, a CSV cell).

Example

Encoding "cheap laptops & tablets" gives "cheap%20laptops%20%26%20tablets" — safe to drop into a ?q= parameter. Decoding it back returns the original phrase.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Don't encode a full URL as if it were a single parameter — the scheme delimiters need to stay literal. Don't double-encode (encoding an already-encoded string produces %2520 where you wanted %20). Don't confuse URL encoding with HTML entity encoding — they solve different problems in different places.