Live
URL Encoder
Percent-encode text for URLs and query strings.
Web · Free tool
URL Decoder
Turn percent-escapes back into readable text — %20 to a space, %C3%A9 to é — and spot invalid escapes instead of guessing.
Decode text
Decodes live as you type. Invalid
% sequences are reported, not silently dropped.
Decoded
How it works
How URL decoding works
Escapes become characters
Every %XX pair is a single byte. The decoder resolves them in order and interprets the byte stream as UTF-8, so multi-byte sequences like %E4%BD%A0 come back as proper characters (你好).
Broken input is flagged
A bare % or a % followed by non-hex characters is invalid percent-encoding. The tool points it out and leaves that spot untouched rather than guessing.
Round-trip ready
Feed the result back into the URL Encoder and you get your original string back — the two tools are exact inverses.
Questions
URL decoder FAQ
Why does my URL look like %20 and %C3%A9?
Those are percent-escapes: %20 is a space, and multi-byte escapes like %C3%A9 are UTF-8 encodings of letters such as é. Browsers use them so any text can travel safely inside a URL.
What happens with invalid escapes?
A lone % or a broken %ZZ sequence is flagged as invalid encoding and left as-is, so you can see exactly what is wrong instead of getting corrupted output.
Does decoding change the URL structure?
Only escapes are converted. Delimiters like /, ?, and # that appear literally in the input stay untouched — this tool is meant for individual encoded components, not whole URLs.