Online URL Encoder / Decoder

Search Engine Optimization

URL Encoder / Decoder

Enter the text that you wish to encode or decode:



About URL Encoder / Decoder

Why you should use the URL encoder/decoder

URL encoding and URL decoding, commonly referred to as 'percent encoding', change a string so that it respects the regulations imposed by the Uniform Resource Locators specification. The RFC 1738 URL specification dictates that only a small set of characters can be used in a URL structure.

These characters are: upper-case letters (A to Z), lower-case letters (a to z), digits (0 to 9), as well as several ‘reserved’ symbols (dollar sign, underscore, period, closing/opening bracket, single quote, asterisk, exclamation, plus sign, and hyphen).

All offending characters must be replaced by a %, followed by the two-digit hexadecimal value that represents the symbol in the ISO character set (e.g. @ becomes %40); otherwise you might encounter problems while trying to pass information through an URL.

Why we built this tool

In the past, people would manually URL encode special characters into their encoding string. This was a tedious task that would generally result in human error. We built this tool to help you URL encode/decode links in a matter of seconds.

What is URL encoding?

URL encoding refers to encoding certain characters in a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). URL encoding is a two-step process: the character string is encoded into a sequence of bytes and then each byte that isn’t an ASCII letter or a digit is also converted to a hexadecimal value of the byte.

What are reserved characters?

Sometimes reserved characters have special meanings, and URL encoding allows them to maintain their special character sequences. In other words, if a reserved character has a reserved purpose in a certain context, the URL scheme dictates that it is URL encoded.

A URL encode converts the character into its corresponding byte value in ASCII. This new value (two digits preceded by a %) will be used in the URL instead of the reserved character.



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