URL Decode Online
Turn %20 and its friends back into readable text. Component decodes everything; Full URL keeps the reserved characters that give an address its structure.
Encoded
Text
About this tool
Percent-encoded text is unreadable by design, and the parts that matter — a redirect target, a search term, a signed callback — are usually the worst of it. Decoding restores the original characters, reading percent-escapes as UTF-8 so non-Latin text comes back correctly. If the string is truncated or contains a stray %, you get a clear error rather than a mangled result.
How to use it
- 1Paste the encoded text into the left panel.
- 2Use Component for a single value, or Full URL for a complete address.
- 3Copy the readable text — the URL Encode page goes the other way.
Frequently asked questions
›Why does my decoded text still have + signs where spaces should be?
Form submissions encode spaces as + rather than %20, and that convention belongs to the form body, not to URLs in general. Replace + with a space before decoding if the string came from an HTML form.
›What does "URI malformed" mean?
A % in the input is not followed by two valid hex digits, or the escapes do not form valid UTF-8. Usually the string was cut short, or a literal % was never encoded as %25.
›Should I use Component or Full URL?
Component decodes everything, which is what you want for a single value pulled out of a query string. Full URL leaves the reserved characters — & = ? / # — encoded, so decoding a whole address does not turn its escaped slashes into structure.
›Why is one string encoded twice?
Double encoding: %2520 is %20 that was encoded again, and it means a value passed through two encoding steps. Decode a second time to get the original.
›Can I decode an entire query string at once?
You can, but decoding the whole string first makes it impossible to tell a real separator from an & that was part of a value. Split on & and = first, then decode each piece.