Should a space be %20 or a plus sign?

Both appear. %20 is correct percent-encoding and works anywhere in a URL. The plus sign means a space only within a query string, under the older form-encoding rules. When in doubt, use %20.

Why do some characters not get encoded?

Unreserved characters — letters, digits, hyphen, underscore, full stop and tilde — are safe everywhere and are deliberately left alone. Encoding them would work but produces needlessly unreadable URLs.

Why did my URL break after encoding it?

Probably because you encoded the whole URL rather than just a parameter value. Encoding the entire string turns the :// and ? into percent sequences, which destroys the structure. Encode individual values, not the URL as a whole.

What does a decode error mean?

That the input contains a % not followed by two valid hexadecimal digits — usually because the text was truncated, or because a literal % was never encoded as %25 in the first place.

Encode & Decode

URL Encoder & Decoder

URLs may only contain a limited set of characters. Anything else — spaces, accented letters, ampersands, question marks — has to be percent-encoded, which replaces the character with a % followed by its hexadecimal byte value. A space becomes %20.

Free, no signupRuns entirely in your browser

Input

Input Text

Operation

Result

https%3A%2F%2Fvibeland.xyz%2Fsearch%3Fq%3Dhappy%20coding!

About

What the URL Encoder & Decoder does

Encoding matters most in query strings. If a parameter value contains an & or a = and is not encoded, it will be parsed as a parameter boundary and silently split your value in two. That is the cause of a great many 'the search works except when someone types an ampersand' bugs.

How it works

Using the URL Encoder & Decoder

1Paste the text or URL you want to convert.
2Choose encode or decode.
3Encoding replaces every reserved or non-ASCII character with its percent-encoded byte sequence.
4Decoding converts percent sequences back into the characters they represent.
5Malformed sequences produce a clear error rather than corrupt output.

Use cases

What people use it for

Building a query string containing user input
Reading a long encoded URL from an analytics report
Debugging a redirect chain with encoded parameters
Encoding a search term for an API request

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

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