Why Do URLs Need Encoding?
URLs can only contain a limited set of characters (ASCII alphanumeric and a few symbols like
- _ . ~). Any other characters—including spaces, emojis, or foreign alphabets—must be
encoded into a safe format known as percent-encoding.
How it works
Characters are replaced by a % followed by their two-digit hexadecimal value. For example:
- Space ( ) becomes
%20 - Exclamation mark (!) becomes
%21 - Forward slash (/) becomes
%2F
When to use this tool?
Use this tool when constructing query parameters for API calls, pasting links into emails where special characters might break the link, or debugging server logs.