URL encoding (also called percent encoding) is a mechanism to encode information in a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) under certain circumstances. It converts characters into a format that can be transmitted over the Internet.
URLs can only be sent over the Internet using the ASCII character-set. Since URLs often contain characters outside the ASCII set, they must be converted into a valid ASCII format.
A complete URL consists of several components:
URL encoding (percent encoding) converts characters that are unsafe or reserved in a URL into a %XX format so the address can be transmitted reliably. For example, a space becomes %20.
No. Encoding, decoding, and analysis all run in your browser. Whatever you paste stays on your device, so you can safely process URLs that contain private tokens or parameters.
Encode whenever a value contains spaces, non-ASCII characters, or reserved symbols, such as search queries, form data, email addresses, or API parameters passed in a query string.
Yes. It can analyze a URL and show its components, such as protocol, hostname, port, path, query, and fragment, and parse individual query parameters for easier inspection.
Encoding converts readable text into the percent-encoded form safe for URLs, while decoding reverses it back to readable text. You can swap input and output to move in either direction.