URL Encoder and Decoder — Percent-Encoding

A URL percent-encoder and decoder that handles Unicode and emoji

Runs in your browser · nothing is uploaded

Treat + as space (form data)

Input

Output

What it is

Only letters, digits and a few symbols can appear in a URL as they are. Anything else, such as non-Latin text, spaces or emoji, is converted to UTF-8 bytes and each byte is written as % plus two hex digits. That is percent-encoding. This tool shows the encoded or decoded result as you type.

How to use

Choose Encode or Decode.
Choose the scope: encodeURIComponent for one query value, encodeURI for a full URL.
Paste text or a URL into the input and the result appears at once.
When decoding form data, tick the plus-as-space option.
Copy the result, or press Use output as input to check the round trip.

How it works

The browser’s own encodeURIComponent, encodeURI, decodeURIComponent and decodeURI do the work, following the rules of RFC 3986.
Text becomes UTF-8 bytes first. A Korean or Chinese character is 3 bytes, so you see three %XX groups, and an emoji is 4 bytes, so four.
Characters left unescaped are A-Z a-z 0-9 - _ . ! ~ * ' ( ). encodeURI also leaves ; , / ? : @ & = + $ # as they are.
An unpaired surrogate cannot be encoded and is reported as an error.
A failed decode is never silently repaired; you get an error message instead.

Examples

Input	Mode	Result
`a b&c=d`	Component	`a%20b%26c%3Dd`
`中文`	Component	`%E4%B8%AD%E6%96%87`
`👍`	Component	`%F0%9F%91%8D`
`https://example.com/검색?q=a b`	Whole URL	`https://example.com/%EA%B2%80%EC%83%89?q=a%20b`

FAQ

What is the difference between encodeURIComponent and encodeURI?

encodeURIComponent is for a single piece such as a query value, so it also escapes the separators / ? & = and #. encodeURI is for a whole URL and leaves those separators alone.

Why do I get a decoding error?

A % must be followed by two hex digits, and the resulting bytes must form valid UTF-8. Check that the string was not cut in the middle and that a literal % is not sitting in the text unescaped.

Should a space be %20 or +?

In a URL path it is %20. The + sign means a space only in HTML form encoding (application/x-www-form-urlencoded). Turn on the plus option when decoding that kind of data.

Is my URL sent to a server?

No. Everything happens in your browser.