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URL Encoder & Decoder

Encode or decode URLs, URI components, and query strings with real-time inspection

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Understanding URL Encoding & Percent-Encoding

Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) are restricted by internet standard RFC 3986 to a defined set of ASCII characters. When you need to transmit spaces, accented letters, emoji, or characters with special syntactic meaning (such as ?, &, =, and /) inside a query parameter or URL path, they must be converted using percent-encoding.

Common URL Character Encodings

  • Space: Encoded as %20 (or + in form data)
  • Ampersand (&): Encoded as %26 (separates query parameters)
  • Equals (=): Encoded as %3D (assigns parameter values)
  • Forward Slash (/): Encoded as %2F
  • Question Mark (?): Encoded as %3F (marks start of query string)
  • Hash (#): Encoded as %23 (identifies anchor fragment)

Difference Between encodeURI and encodeURIComponent

When developing web applications or debugging REST APIs, choosing the correct encoding scope is critical:

  • encodeURIComponent(): Encodes all non-standard characters, including punctuation and delimiters like / and ?. Use this whenever you are formatting a variable that will be appended as a parameter value.
  • encodeURI(): Assumes the input is already a complete, valid URL. It leaves structural delimiters (like http://, ?, and &) intact while encoding non-ASCII characters in the pathname.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What is URL encoding (percent-encoding)?

URL encoding replaces unsafe or reserved characters with a percent symbol (%) followed by two hexadecimal digits corresponding to their byte value in UTF-8 encoding.

Why do query string parameters break without URL encoding?

If a parameter value contains an unencoded ampersand (&) or equals sign (=), the server parser treats it as the start of a new parameter rather than part of the intended text value.

Does this tool handle multi-byte Unicode characters and emoji?

Yes. The tool natively uses UTF-8 byte serialization, so international characters (like Chinese, Arabic, Cyrillic) and modern emoji are cleanly encoded into standard percent triplets.

Is my sensitive API data or token transmitted anywhere?

No. EasyToolz processes all string transformations 100% locally in your client browser session. No data is stored, cached, or logged on remote servers.