Why does my decoded text still have %20 in it?

Because it was encoded twice. Decode the result again. If that happens routinely on a link your own code produced, something is encoding a value that had already been encoded.

An encoded forward slash. It appears when a slash was part of a value rather than part of the path — a date like 2026/08 inside a parameter, for instance.

Can I decode a whole URL safely?

Yes, but be aware that decoding a full URL can make it ambiguous: an encoded ampersand inside a value becomes indistinguishable from a real parameter separator once decoded. For inspection that is fine; do not feed the decoded form back into a request.

Is anything sent to a server?

No. The decoding happens in your browser, which matters because tracking URLs frequently contain email addresses and account identifiers.

URL Decoder

Turns percent-encoded text back into readable characters, including the double-encoded strings that arrive when two layers both did the escaping.

Runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded

Input

Output

Your result appears here. Everything runs in your browser.

Need this as an API?

Why use it

Built to be genuinely useful

Reads UTF-8 correctly

%C3%A9 comes back as é rather than two broken characters, because the bytes are decoded as UTF-8 rather than one at a time.

Shows double encoding for what it is

A result still containing %20 after one pass means the value was encoded twice. That is worth knowing, because it points at a bug rather than at your input.

Nothing is uploaded

It runs in your browser. Tokens, keys and customer data routinely end up in these tools, and none of it should have to cross a network to be decoded.

Free, no sign-up

No account, no daily cap, and no feature held back behind a paywall.

How it works

Three steps

1
Paste the encoded URL or value.
2
Read the decoded text.
3
Decode again if the result still contains percent sequences.

Reading a URL that has been through several systems

A tracking link that has passed through an email provider, a redirector and an analytics wrapper often contains the original URL encoded inside a parameter of another URL, sometimes more than once. Decoding it a layer at a time is how you find out where it actually goes before clicking it.

The tell for another layer is a result that still contains % sequences. Each decode strips one layer. When the output stops containing them and reads as an ordinary URL, you have reached the destination.

When decoding produces something that looks wrong

Two failures look similar and have different causes. A string containing an invalid sequence — a % not followed by two hexadecimal digits — cannot be decoded at all, and a decoder that silently drops it will hand you a subtly altered value.

The other is a correctly decoded value that contains characters you did not expect, which usually means the original was encoded in something other than UTF-8. Older systems sometimes emit Latin-1 percent sequences, and those decode to the wrong characters no matter how correct the decoder is.

FAQ

Questions people ask

API access

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