URL encoder/decoder

About this tool

Use this online tool to encode or decode a string of text. For worldwide interoperability, URIs have to be encoded uniformly. To map the wide range of characters used worldwide into the 60 or so allowed characters in a URI, a two-step process is used:

1. Convert the character string into a sequence of bytes using the UTF-8 encoding.
2. Convert each byte that is not an ASCII letter or digit to %HH, where HH is the hexadecimal value of the byte.

For example

The string François, would be encoded as Fran%C3%A7ois. The “ç” is encoded in UTF-8 as two bytes C3 (hex) and A7 (hex), which are then written as the three characters “%c3” and “%a7” respectively. This can make a URI rather long (up to 9 ASCII characters for a single Unicode character), but the intention is that browsers only need to display the decoded form, and many protocols can send UTF-8 without the %HH escaping.

What is URL encoding?

URL encoding stands for encoding certain characters in a URL by replacing them with one or more character triplets that consist of the percent character “%” followed by two hexadecimal digits. The two hexadecimal digits of the triplets represent the numeric value of the replaced character.

The term URL encoding is a bit inexact because the encoding procedure is not limited to URLs (Uniform Resource Locators), but can also be applied to any other URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) such as URNs (Uniform Resource Names). Therefore, the term percent-encoding should be preferred.