URL Decode
Paste a percent-encoded URL or query string and get the readable version back. Runs in your browser.
URL TOOLS
Decodes percent-encoded characters back to their original form (decodeURIComponent).
How it works
URL encoding uses the browser's built-in encodeURIComponent and decodeURIComponent functions. Query string parsing uses the native URLSearchParams API. Everything runs locally using browser-native APIs.
Processing runs in your browser
All encoding, decoding, and parsing happens inside your browser tab. Our servers are not involved at any point. You can see this yourselfin your browser's DevTools Network tab.
Technical specification
Percent-encoding (URL encoding) is defined in RFC 3986 §2.1 (IETF, 2005). Each octet is represented as a % followed by two uppercase hexadecimal digits. Unreserved characters (A–Z, a–z, 0–9, -._~) are never encoded. Reserved characters (:/?#[]@!$&'()*+,;=) are encoded when used outside their syntactic role. This tool uses the browser's native encodeURIComponent / decodeURIComponent functions, which follow the WHATWG URL Standard built on RFC 3986.
- Standard
- RFC 3986. Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax
- Encoding unit
- One octet →
%XX(two uppercase hex digits) - Space encoding
%20per RFC 3986;+in HTML form data (RFC 1866)- Browser API
encodeURIComponent()/URLSearchParams
Related operations
To encode binary blobs as text, try Base64. For escaping reserved markup characters, use HTML entities. To inspect the encoded query body of a JSON request, see the JSON formatter.
Frequently asked questions
- What does URL decoding do?
- It converts percent-encoded sequences (like %20 or %2F) back into their original characters.
- Can I decode a full URL?
- Yes. Paste the entire URL and it will decode all encoded components.
- What about + signs?
- In query strings, + is sometimes used instead of %20 for spaces. The tool handles both conventions.