Whether you want to encode or decode a URL, our online URL Encoder Decoder can help you. Enter the URL in the text box or upload a file and click the appropriate Encode or Decode button.
URL Encoder/Decoder
About Online URL Encoder Decoder
MySmallTools provides the smartest and fastest free online URL Encoder Decoder tool. This online URL Encoder Decoder tool is very useful when you want to add special characters (often called percent encoding) to URL parameters.
The process of URL encoding involves replacing the illegal character with % (percent sign) and two additional hex values. URL Decode works when you want to know the source of an email campaign or newsletter.
How do I use this online URL Encoder/Decoder?
The free online URL Encoder Decoder tool MySmallTools works by entering a text string into the field found at this link https://mysmalltools.com/url-encoder-decoder. Then just click the “Encode” or “Decode” button and the results will be displayed instantly. This is useful for converting encoded JavaScript URLs that contain barely readable text into more readable text. Typically, URLs contain non-alphanumeric characters or characters encoded with “%” (percent sign) followed by alphanumeric text. Spaces within the text are encoded using the “+” symbol.
URLs can only be sent to the Internet using the ASCII character set. Because these URLs contain characters outside the ASCII set, the URLs must be converted to a usable ASCII form. This URL encoding is utilized to supplant risky ASCII characters with a percent sign (%) trailed by two hexadecimal digits. In URL encoding, spaces are replaced by a plus sign (+) or .
What is URL encoding and URL decoding?
URL encoding is usually used in query strings, also known as Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). Users actually only want to use URL encoding for special characters. This free online URL encoding/decoding tool can help you when you want to encode or decode URLs.
What is URL encoding used for?
The URL specification RFC 1738 states that there are a small number of characters that can be used in a URL. These characters are listed below: A through Z (ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ) – (hyphen or dash) a through z (abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz) _ (underscore) 0 through 9 (0123456789) . (dot) $ (dollar sign) ! (exclamation point or exclamation mark) + (plus sign) * (asterisk or asterisk) ( (open parenthesis) ` (single quote) ) (closing parenthesis)
How does URL encoding work?
Online URL encoding or percent encoding is a way of encoding certain information into a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) in certain situations. Commonly known as URL encoding, it is typically used within the main set of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), which includes both Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) and Uniform Resource Names (URNs).
This online URL encoding is also used for preparing data and sending HTML form data in HTTP requests. All characters that need to be changed are replaced with a percent sign (%) and the two-digit hexadecimal value that represents the corresponding character in the ISO character set.
Here are some examples: $ (dollar sign) becomes $ + (plus) becomes + & (ampersand) becomes & (comma) becomes , : (colon) becomes : (semicolon) becomes ; = (equal) = ? (question mark) becomes ? @ (Commercial A/At) becomes @
What are the different types of URI characters?
Characters allowed in a URI are either reserved or non-reserved characters (or the percent sign as part of a percent encoding). A reserved character is a character that may have special meaning. A good example of this is the slash, which is often used to separate different parts of a URL. Non-reserved characters, on the other hand, have no special meaning.
When using percent encoding, reserved characters are represented by their own character arrangement. The set of reserved and unreserved characters, and the conditions under which certain reserved characters have special meaning, have changed slightly with each change to the specifications governing URIs and URI schemes.
How does percent-encoding unreserved characters work?
If a particular character from the reserved set has special meaning in a particular context, and the URI scheme indicates that it is important to use that particular character for a different purpose, then that character should be percent-encoded.
To percent-encode a reserved character, you typically convert the character to its corresponding byte value in ASCII and then represent that value as a pair of hexadecimal digits. The number before the percent sign (%) is used in the URI in place of the reserved character.
Additionally, characters that are not ASCII characters are typically converted to a UTF-8 byte array, with each byte value represented as above. Reserved characters that do not have a reserved purpose in a particular context can also be percent-encoded, but are semantically no different from other characters.
Take the following as an example: ‘/’ is still considered a reserved character, but it typically does not have a reserved purpose unless a particular URI scheme dictates otherwise. Because of this, a character does not need to be percent-encoded if it has no reserved purpose.
Characters from the unreserved set do not need to be percent-encoded. URIs that differ only in whether an unreserved character is percent-encoded or occurs verbatim are equivalent by definition, but URI mainframes cannot always distinguish this similarity.
For maximum interoperability, we recommend that URI creators not percent-encode unreserved characters. Is it possible to percent-encode a percent sign? Because the percent sign (%) already serves as a character for a percent-encoded octet, it must be percent-encoded as ‘%’ for this octet in order for users to use it as data in a URI.
What is percent-encoding arbitrary data?
Many URI schemes involve representing arbitrary data, such as an IP address or a selected file system path, as a component of the URI. A URI scheme specification must provide an unambiguous mapping between URI characters and all other possible data values represented by those characters.