URL encoder / decoder
Prepare a query value or path segment, or turn percent-encoded text back into readable characters.
Ready when you are.
A practical example
Input or settings
Café & tea + cake
Example result
Caf%C3%A9%20%26%20tea%20%2B%20cake
When this helps
Useful for individual query values and path segments containing spaces, accents or punctuation. Paste one component, not a complete URL you want to keep navigable.
How it works and its limits
Encoding uses UTF-8 percent escapes and also escapes !, apostrophes, parentheses and *. Reserved characters such as /, ?, #, & and = are encoded because the input is treated as one component.
By default spaces become %20 and a literal + is encoded as %2B. Decoding keeps a + as a plus sign. Form mode instead writes spaces as + and reads + as a space.
Decoding runs once. Malformed percent escapes, invalid UTF-8 bytes and unpaired Unicode surrogates are rejected. Encoding does not validate a URL, make an unsafe link safe or replace context-specific HTML escaping.
Useful details
Should I paste an entire URL?
Use this for a component. Encoding a whole URL also encodes its structural separators.
Why did a plus sign stay a plus sign?
That is the default component behavior. Enable form mode to interpret + as a space.
Does %2520 become a space?
Not in one pass. It becomes %20; decode again only if that is what the source requires.