URL Encode and Decode

No. Pasted text and uploaded files are both read and converted entirely on your device, and nothing is sent to a server. Turn off your Wi-Fi after the page loads and it still works. This page loads 11KB of JavaScript, gzipped - about what your browser's network tab will show for this page's own scripts.

Just a piece of text - a query parameter value, a search term, or any string you want to safely embed inside a URL. If you paste in a whole URL (like https://example.com/search?q=an example), the : and / characters get encoded too, because this tool treats everything you give it as one value, not as a structured URL with parts that should stay as-is. If you only need to encode the value of one query parameter, paste just that part rather than the entire URL.

Not every piece of text is valid percent-encoding - if what you pasted was already plain text (not something that had been encoded), decoding it back can hit a stray % with no valid hex digits after it, or a percent sequence that doesn’t form a real character. That’s expected: the encoded panel above it still shows a correct result either way.

%20 is the standard percent-encoding for a space (RFC 3986). A literal + is an older convention from HTML form submissions (application/x-www-form-urlencoded) that many query strings still use. Turn on “spaces as +” if the system you’re working with expects that style instead.

Everything except letters, digits, and - _ . ! ~ * ' ( ) gets percent-encoded - the same unreserved-character set the browser’s own encodeURIComponent uses, so the result matches what JavaScript, and most other languages’ standard libraries, would produce.

Yes. Text is encoded as UTF-8 bytes first, then each byte is percent-encoded, so café becomes caf%C3%A9 and decodes back to exactly the same text, multi-byte characters included.