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URL Encode
Encode to URL-encoded format or decode from it with various advanced options. Our site has an easy to use online tool to convert your data.
URL encoding, also known as "percent-encoding", is a mechanism for encoding information in a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). Although it is known as URL encoding it is, in fact, used more generally within the main Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) set, which includes both Uniform Resource Locator (URL) and Uniform Resource Name (URN). As such it is also used in the preparation of data of the "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" media type, as is often employed in the submission of HTML form data in HTTP requests.
Advanced options
- Character set: Our website uses the UTF-8 character set, so your input data is transmitted in that format. Change this option if you want to convert the data to another character set before encoding. Note that in case of text data, the encoding scheme does not contain the character set, so you may have to specify the appropriate set during the decoding process. As for files, the binary option is the default, which will omit any conversion; this option is required for everything except plain text documents.
- Newline separator: Unix and Windows systems use different line break characters, so prior to encoding either variant will be replaced within your data by the selected option. For the files section, this is partially irrelevant since files already contain the corresponding separators, but you can define which one to use for the "encode each line separately" and "split lines into chunks" functions.
- Encode each line separately: Even newline characters are converted to their percent-encoded forms. Use this option if you want to encode multiple independent data entries separated with line breaks. (*)
- Split lines into chunks: The encoded data will become a continuous text without any whitespaces, so check this option if you want to break it up into multiple lines. The applied character limit is defined in the MIME (RFC 2045) specification, which states that the encoded lines must be no more than 76 characters long. (*)
- Live mode: When you turn on this option the entered data is encoded immediately with your browser's built-in JavaScript functions, without sending any information to our servers. Currently this mode supports only the UTF-8 character set.
(*) These options cannot be enabled simultaneously since the resulting output would not be valid for the majority of applications.
Safe and secure
All communications with our servers come through secure SSL encrypted connections (https). We delete uploaded files from our servers immediately after being processed and the resulting downloadable file is deleted right after the first download attempt or 15 minutes of inactivity (whichever is shorter). We do not keep or inspect the contents of the submitted data or uploaded files in any way. Read our privacy policy below for more details.
Completely free
Our tool is free to use. From now on, you don't need to download any software for such simple tasks.
Details of the URL encoding
Types of URI characters
The characters allowed in a URI are either reserved or unreserved (or a percent character as part of a percent-encoding). Reserved characters are characters that sometimes have special meaning. For example, forward slash characters are used to separate different parts of a URL (or more generally, a URI). Unreserved characters have no such special meanings. Using percent-encoding, reserved characters are represented using special character sequences. The sets of reserved and unreserved characters and the circumstances under which certain reserved characters have special meaning have changed slightly with each new revision of specifications that govern URIs and URI schemes.