URL Encoder / Decoder

URL Encode and Decode Online

Percent-encoding is a method of representing special characters in a URL using the % sign followed by two hexadecimal digits. It is defined by the RFC 3986 standard.

Why URL Encoding Is Needed

• transmitting non-ASCII characters (e.g. Cyrillic, Chinese) in URLs;
• escaping special characters (&, =, ?, #) in query parameters;
• encoding form data before submission (application/x-www-form-urlencoded);
• building correct API requests with query parameters.

rawurlencode vs urlencode

This tool uses rawurlencode (RFC 3986), which encodes spaces as %20. The urlencode function encodes spaces as + and is intended for form data only.

Frequently Asked Questions

• What is the difference between URL-encode and HTML-encode?

  URL-encode (Percent-encoding) converts characters that are not safe in a URI — such as spaces or non-ASCII letters — into the %XX format. HTML-encode replaces special characters (for example, <, >, &) with named entities such as &lt; for safe display inside HTML markup. The two tools serve different purposes: URL-encode is for the address bar and GET parameters, HTML-encode is for rendering code as visible text.

• Why does Cyrillic text in a URL turn into a long string of percent signs?

  According to RFC 3986, all characters outside ASCII (including Cyrillic letters) are encoded as UTF-8 bytes. Each UTF-8 byte is represented as %HH, so a word with 6 Russian letters can expand to 12–18 characters. Browsers automatically decode such URLs before displaying them, but the encoded form is required for transmission to the server.

• How do I check whether a link is encoded correctly before sending it?

  Use the decode function: paste the encoded link into the field and click "Decode". If the output is readable text without errors, the encoding is correct. Note that double-encoding (for example, %25 instead of %) is considered an error — the 101ip.ru tool handles such cases correctly and will not double-encode an already encoded string.