Can I decode a full URL?

Yes. Paste the entire URL and every percent-encoded component is decoded in place. The URL structure (scheme, host, path, query) remains intact.

%20 is the percent-encoded form of a space character. Different parts of a URL may show spaces as either %20 or + (in query strings), the decoder handles both.

What if my URL contains invalid percent sequences?

Invalid sequences (like a lone % without two hex digits) produce a decoding error message. The original input is preserved so you can fix the value and try again.

Is the URL sent to a server?

All decoding runs in your browser using JavaScript's built-in decodeURIComponent. Our servers are not involved at any point.

Decode URL Online

Paste a percent-encoded URL or fragment to see the readable original. Sequences like %20, %2F, and %3A are translated back into spaces, slashes, and colons. All decoding runs in your browser.

Input

Output

URL TOOLS

URL Decode

Decodes percent-encoded characters back to their original form (decodeURIComponent).

Runs entirely in your browser

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: %20 per 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

Can I decode a full URL?: Yes. Paste the entire URL and every percent-encoded component is decoded in place. The URL structure (scheme, host, path, query) remains intact.
What does %20 mean?: %20 is the percent-encoded form of a space character. Different parts of a URL may show spaces as either %20 or + (in query strings), the decoder handles both.
What if my URL contains invalid percent sequences?: Invalid sequences (like a lone % without two hex digits) produce a decoding error message. The original input is preserved so you can fix the value and try again.
Is the URL sent to a server?: All decoding runs in your browser using JavaScript's built-in decodeURIComponent. Our servers are not involved at any point.