URL Encoder / Decoder

Encode, decode, and parse URL components instantly

DeveloperFREEYour data never leaves your browser

100% freeNo signupRuns in your browser

Built by WOWHOW Team · 14+ yrs engineering

URL Encoder / Decoder is a free, browser-based tool that lets you encode, decode, and parse url components instantly — with zero signup, zero installation. Your data never leaves your browser. Part of 138+ free developer and business tools at wowhow.cloud, built and maintained by a team with 14+ years of hands-on development experience.

TOOLURL Encoder / Decoder

String to encode

Enter a URL or string above, or load a sample.

About URL Encoder / Decoder

URL encoding is required whenever special characters appear in query strings, form data, or REST API paths. A misplaced unencoded & or + can silently corrupt a parameter value. This tool encodes and decodes individual strings and parses complete URLs into their RFC 3986 components — useful for debugging OAuth redirect URIs, webhook endpoints, and query parameter issues.

How It Works

Encoding uses the browser-native encodeURIComponent() function, which implements RFC 3986 unreserved character set encoding. Decoding uses decodeURIComponent() with a try/catch that falls back to a manual byte-level decode for malformed or Latin-1-encoded sequences.

URL parsing uses the browser-native URL constructor, which implements the WHATWG URL standard. It reliably handles edge cases like missing protocols, IPv6 hosts, and IDN (internationalised domain names). Query parameters are extracted via URLSearchParams, which correctly handles repeated keys and plus-sign space encoding.

Who Is This For

A developer debugging a broken OAuth redirect URL encodes the callback URL before adding it as a query parameter, then verifies the round-trip decode is lossless.

A backend engineer parses an incoming webhook URL to extract query parameters and confirm the signature matches without writing a one-off Node.js script.

A QA tester decodes a percent-encoded error message embedded in a redirect URL to read the original error text from the server.

How to Use

Paste a URL or string into the input field

Toggle between Encode and Decode to convert the string

Switch to URL Parser mode to break a full URL into components

Copy individual components or the full result with the copy buttons

Frequently Asked Questions

encodeURIComponent encodes everything except letters, digits, and - _ . ! ~ * ' ( ). It is correct for encoding query parameter values. encodeURI is for full URLs and leaves : / ? # [ ] @ intact.

Non-ASCII and reserved characters in URLs are replaced with a % followed by two hex digits representing their UTF-8 byte value. For example, a space becomes %20 and é becomes %C3%A9.

Yes. The URL Parser tab breaks any valid URL into protocol, hostname, port, pathname, hash, and a table of all query parameters (key → value pairs).

If the percent-encoded string uses a non-UTF-8 encoding (e.g., Latin-1 from legacy systems), decodeURIComponent will throw. The tool catches this and shows the raw decoded bytes instead.