How Does Our URL Encoder & Decoder Tool Work?
Our URL Encoder & Decoder tool makes it super easy to encode or decode your URLs. Here’s how it works.
- Choose between the Encoder or Decoder tab
- Specify the URL you want to encode or decode
- Then hit the Encode or Decode button
After hitting the button, you can find the output just below the Encode & Decode tool.
What is URL Encoding / Decoding?
When you transmit information through a URL, you need to ensure that it only uses specific allowed character set, known as ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) character set.
Since URLs often contain characters outside the ASCII set, they have to be converted into a valid ASCII format. This is where URL encoding comes in.
URL encoding, which also known as percent-encoding, is the process of converting characters in a URL into ASCII characters.
ASCII is a character set containing 128 characters, including the number from 0-9, the upper and lower case English letters, and some special characters.
URL encoding lets you replace unsafe characters with a “%” followed by two hexadecimal digits. For example, if your URL includes spaces, the encoding process replaces it with a plus (+) sign or with %20.
What Should be Encoded?
All non-ASCII characters in a URL that are being used outside its normal context need to be encoded. Let’s take a look at a few common characters in a URL and their encoding.
| Character | URL Encoded |
|---|---|
| ; | %3B |
| ? | %3F |
| / | %2F |
| : | %3B |
| # | %23 |
| & | %24 |
| = | %3D |
| + | %2B |
| $ | %24 |
| < space > | %20 or + |
| % | %25 |
If you transmit data using the GET method, then you’ll need to encode the data as it will be sent over the URL. For instance, if you are writing a clickable link to promote your post on Facebook or promote an RSS feed, then your URL will need to be encoded.
Now go ahead and encode your next URL.
