What is a URL Encoder & Decoder?
A URL encoder converts strings and URLs into percent-encoded format, where special characters are replaced by a percent sign followed by their two-digit hexadecimal ASCII or Unicode code point (for example, a space becomes %20, & becomes %26, and Chinese characters become multi-byte sequences like %E4%B8%AD). URL encoding is required because URLs can only contain a limited set of ASCII characters — the RFC 3986 specification defines which characters are allowed in different parts of a URL (scheme, host, path, query, fragment), and any characters outside this allowed set must be percent-encoded. The URL Encoder & Decoder handles both encoding (converting plain text or URLs with special characters to percent-encoded form) and decoding (converting percent-encoded strings back to human-readable form). It supports encoding of full URLs, individual query string parameters, form data values, and path segments, following the appropriate encoding rules for each URL component.