Encode special characters for safe URL usage or decode percent-encoded strings back to plain text. Instant, no signup.
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URL encoding (also called percent-encoding) converts characters that are not safe to include in a URL into a format that can be safely transmitted over the internet. Characters like spaces, ampersands, question marks, and non-ASCII characters (like Hindi or Chinese characters) are replaced with a percent sign followed by their hexadecimal code (e.g., space becomes %20).
URLs can only contain a limited set of ASCII characters. Any character outside this set, or characters that have special meaning in URLs (like ? which starts query strings, or & which separates parameters), must be encoded to avoid ambiguity. Without encoding, a URL containing a space or a special character would break.
URL encoding makes text safe for URLs by encoding special characters. Base64 encoding converts binary data to a text string. They solve different problems — use URL encoding for query parameters and URL components; use Base64 for encoding binary data. Try our Base64 Encoder for binary data encoding.