URL encoder

How it works

Percent-encoding replaces any character that is not safe in a URL with a percent sign and two hexadecimal digits, for example %20 for a space. The tool uses the browser's encodeURIComponent, which leaves letters, digits and - _ . ! ~ * ' ( ) alone and encodes everything else, including spaces, ampersands, equals signs, slashes, non-Latin characters and emoji. Multi-byte characters are encoded one UTF-8 byte at a time, so an Arabic letter becomes three percent sequences. Decoding does the reverse and stops with a message when it meets a percent sign that is not followed by two hexadecimal digits, which is the usual cause of a failed decode.

Worked example

a b&c=d encodes to a%20b%26c%3Dd: the space becomes %20, the ampersand becomes %26 and the equals sign becomes %3D, while the letters are left alone. Decoding hello%20world%2Fx gives back hello world/x, because %20 is a space and %2F is a forward slash. That slash is encoded deliberately — encodeURIComponent always escapes it, so encode path segments separately if you want slashes to stay visible.

Questions and answers