URL Decoder
Decode percent-encoded URLs back to readable text. Handles UTF-8 multi-byte sequences.
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About URL Decoder
URL decoding reverses percent-encoding: every %XX sequence becomes the byte 0xXX, and the resulting bytes are interpreted as UTF-8 to produce the original text. Useful for inspecting URLs lifted from logs, deciphering query parameters, or recovering original strings from encoded form submissions.
When to use it
- Reading a URL out of a log file or referrer header
- Inspecting query-string parameters that contain encoded values
- Reversing accidental double-encoding
- Recovering Unicode strings from URL-encoded payloads
How it works
The input is fed to decodeURIComponent, which replaces every %XX sequence with the corresponding byte and interprets the result as UTF-8. Invalid percent sequences (lone % without two hex digits, or non-UTF-8 byte combinations) throw a descriptive error.
Examples
Hello%20world%20%26%20friends%21
Hello world & friends!
caf%C3%A9%2F%F0%9F%8E%89
café/🎉
Frequently asked questions
- Are + signs converted to spaces?
- No — decodeURIComponent does not decode + as space. That conversion is specific to application/x-www-form-urlencoded; if your input came from a form, replace + with space (or with %20) before decoding.
- What happens with malformed percent-encoding?
- An error is reported. The most common cause is a lone % character — escape it as %25 to be safe.