Free URL decoder – decode and encode URLs instantly in your browser. Fast, private, no installation required.
Copy your encoded URL and paste it into the input field above.
The tool automatically decodes your URL in real-time as you type.
Click the copy button to save the decoded URL to your clipboard.
Automatically detects and decodes multiple layers of URL encoding until the result is stable.
Full support for UTF-8 encoded characters, including international text and emojis.
Identifies malformed URL encoding and provides clear error messages for debugging.
All processing happens in your browser. Your data never leaves your device.
URL percent-encoding is a fundamental mechanism used to encode special characters in URLs. When you see characters like %20 or %26, these represent the percent-sign (%) followed by hexadecimal values that correspond to specific characters.
UTF-8 decoding is essential for handling international characters in URLs. Our tool fully supports UTF-8 encoded content, allowing you to decode URLs containing characters from any language, including Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and emoji characters.
is crucial for web development. A URL consists of several parts: protocol, domain, path, query parameters, and fragment. Each component may require encoding when containing reserved characters like URL components ?, &, =, #.
REST API debugging. When working with APIs, you often encounter encoded query parameters or path segments. Being able to quickly decode these URLs helps identify issues in API requests and understand the actual data being transmitted.
You meet percent-encoding in far more places than the address bar. The query string of an OAuth redirect_uri, the deep link inside a push notification, the tracking link in a marketing email, and the path segment written into a web server log all carry encoded data. Decoding them by hand is slow and error-prone, which is why this page does the work for you as soon as you paste.
One detail that trips people up: in HTML form submissions (application/x-www-form-urlencoded), a + sign means a space. But in a percent-encoded URL, + is just a plus. That is why the same input can decode differently depending on where it came from — and why %2B exists for a literal plus in form-style data. This decoder follows the URL Standard: it decodes percent sequences and leaves + alone.
These eight sequences cover most of what you will see in real URLs. I verified every mapping in this table against the WHATWG URL Standard before publishing it.
| Encoded | Decoded | Where You See It |
|---|---|---|
%20 | space | The classic. A typed space always becomes %20 in a URL. |
%23 | # | A literal hash. A raw # would start the fragment, so it is encoded when it is data. |
%26 | & | A literal ampersand. A raw & would split query parameters. |
%3D | = | A literal equals sign. A raw = separates keys from values. |
%3F | ? | A literal question mark. A raw ? would start the query string. |
%2B | + | A literal plus sign. In query strings many servers read a bare + as a space, so a real plus must be encoded. |
%25 | % | The percent sign itself. Always encoded, or the decoder would misread the sequence. |
%2F | / | A forward slash inside a value. Servers often leave it raw in paths but not in query data. |
Take this URL, the kind you might copy out of a browser address bar:
https://api.example.com/search?q=hello%20world&lang=zh%26enEverything before ? is the path. Everything after is the query string, where each pair is separated by &.
The decoder reads the two values hello%20world and zh%26en and converts each percent sequence back to its character.
q becomes hello world and lang becomes zh&en. The & inside zh%26en was data, not a separator — decoding restores it without breaking the structure.
The same decode in JavaScript:
const url = "https://api.example.com/search?q=hello%20world&lang=zh%26en";
const params = new URLSearchParams(new URL(url).search);
console.log(params.get("q")); // "hello world"
console.log(params.get("lang")); // "zh&en"Running this prints:
hello world
zh&enOne layer at a time. If a URL has been encoded twice you will see %2520 in the source. A first decode turns it into %20 and a second into a space. The decoder on this page detects those extra layers and resolves them for you.
You can decode a URL by hand, in a browser console, or in a server-side script. Here is how the common approaches compare:
| Method | UTF-8 | Multi-Layer | When to Use |
|---|---|---|---|
| URL Decode Online | Yes | Yes, automatic | Everyday decoding: paste once, get the full decoded text, and any malformed sequence is flagged. |
| Reading codes by hand | Slow | Confusing | Only realistic for single characters; %E4%B8%AD = 中 requires memorizing UTF-8 byte tables. |
| decodeURIComponent() | Yes | No | Quick checks in the DevTools console; it throws a URIError on malformed input. |
| Python unquote() | Yes | No | Server-side scripts and log pipelines; unquote_plus also converts + to space. |
| curl --data-urlencode | Yes | No | Encoding rather than decoding: handy for test requests, and it writes spaces as + form-style. |
Percent-encoded strings show up in more workflows than just fixing a broken link:
URL decoding (also known as percent-decoding) is the process of converting encoded characters in a URL back to their original form. When data is transmitted via URLs, special characters are replaced with a percent sign (%) followed by two hexadecimal digits. For example, %20 represents a space character, and %26 represents an ampersand (&).
Simply paste your encoded URL into the input field at the top of this page. Our tool automatically decodes the URL in real-time as you type, showing the result instantly. You can then copy the decoded result with one click. No registration, payment, or software installation required. You can also paste partially encoded URLs; the decoder keeps going until nothing further can be decoded and shows you how many layers it processed.
Percent-encoding (also called URL encoding) is a mechanism for encoding information in URLs using only the limited ASCII character set. Special characters are replaced with a percent sign (%) followed by their hexadecimal ASCII value. This ensures URLs can be safely transmitted across all systems without data corruption. For example, the emoji 😀 becomes %F0%9F%98%80 — its four UTF-8 bytes written out in hexadecimal.
URLs can only contain a limited set of ASCII characters. Special characters like spaces, ampersands, question marks, and non-ASCII characters (such as UTF-8 international text) must be encoded to be safely transmitted in URLs. This ensures URLs work correctly across all browsers, servers, and systems worldwide. Leaving these characters raw changes the meaning of the URL: & splits parameters, # starts a fragment, and many servers reject a raw space outright.
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