URL Encoder Decoder

When HTML form data is submitted through an HTTP request using methods GET or POST, or submitted via email submission, it is encoded before transmission - often called URL encoding.

Encoding ensures that non-ASCII characters and special characters can be transmitted without creating problems; for instance, space becomes when transmitted over email.

Encoding

URL Encoding is a process of transforming characters into a form that can safely travel over the Internet, replacing unsafe ASCII characters with "%" followed by two hexadecimal digits and replacing unsafe characters with two hexadecimal digits instead. URL encoding can also be used to pass character data through HTML form fields, POST requests and email. Improper encoding can lead to broken links or misinterpreted data - this tool allows you to encode/decode any string of characters including spaces/special symbols/non-ASCII letters etc.

Encoding of Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) strings is important as certain characters carry special significance in certain contexts - like forward slash in URL or Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). To use such characters within an URI string, they must be percent-encoded using sequences of three hexadecimal digits.

However, other characters not part of URI syntax may need to be percent-encoded for various reasons. For instance, in certain URI schemes an unreserved character such as / may be required as a path segment delimiter and in this instance should be percent encoded using either the sequence %2F or %2f; similarly some reserved characters such as or & have special significance that must also be encoded using percent codes.

Decoding

Decoding converts encoded data back to its raw form for proper display on browsers. Our tool uses JavaScript functions built into browsers to decode your input, eliminating the need for sending any information back to us for decoding.

URI schemes and protocols often fail to account for the fact that encoded data could consist of both character data and binary data, presuming instead that its character set identifies its bytes directly, with character mappings occurring one-for-one between characters.

Ascii characters cannot always accurately represent characters outside its range, which leads to broken links and other errors. Our tool takes this into account and gives you options for choosing an encoding table used during conversion as well as whether or not to decode characters outside reserved and unreserved sets. You can even use Live mode to watch as data decoding happens instantly without submitting it through our servers.

UTF-8

Text encoding is crucial to making websites and web applications work for everyone, with UTF-8 being the most widely adopted standard on the World Wide Web. Encoding involves the conversion of Unicode code points (those magical U+ numbers) into bytes that computers can understand. There are numerous encoding standards available online; UTF-8 being one such popular standard.

UTF-8 uses one to four bytes per character to represent its representation, and can encode all 1,112,064 valid Unicode code points. It includes printable ASCII characters as well as many international characters, symbols and emojis.

When writing web content, UTF-8 encoding should always be used for maximum viewer compatibility - especially on sites that target an international audience. UTF-8 is also the recommended default and recommended encoding in HTML5.

UTF-16

UTF-16 is generally more efficient when text is written with characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), such as text written in Spanish or Italian; however, as most web content is written in English and many applications only deal with ASCII text, UTF-8 has become the more prevalent choice.

Each character in UTF-16 requires two 16-bit code units known as surrogate pairs to represent. These code units, known as high and low surrogates respectively, fall between U+D800-U+DBFF.

A BOM, or Byte Order Mark, must appear in the first byte of each code unit to indicate its encoding as UTF-16. In Windows this value is represented as U+FEFF; its presence allows UTF-16 to recognize whether it is valid stream and prevent UTF-8 encoded data from being incorrectly decoded as UTF-16; this makes UTF-16 more self-synchronizing than other encodings.

ASCII

URL encoding is an essential process in website-management-tools, converting ASCII text into a secure, web-safe format. It replaces special characters with the percent sign (%) and two hexadecimal digits, ensuring safe Internet transmission. This prevents browsers and servers from misinterpreting data, avoiding errors or loss.

Developers often rely on online URL encoding tools to quickly encode or decode text without coding knowledge—making web development faster, more accurate, and secure.