URL Encode / Decode

About this calculator

This tool converts text to and from percent-encoding (also called URL encoding), the scheme that represents characters unsafe for a URL — spaces, ampersands, question marks, accented and non-Latin letters, and so on — as a percent sign followed by their hexadecimal byte value, such as a space becoming %20. URLs can only reliably carry a limited set of ASCII characters, so anything outside that set has to be encoded or the URL risks being truncated, misparsed, or having its query parameters mixed up.

It is used by web developers building query strings and API requests by hand, by anyone needing to share a link that contains special characters or non-English text in a parameter, and by people decoding a long, unreadable URL they received to see what it actually says. It's a routine step whenever user-generated text — a search term, an email address, a file name — needs to be embedded inside a URL rather than sent as plain text.