URL Decoder
Developer ToolsTurn percent-encoded URLs back into readable text.
Runs entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded
What people do next
Features
- Decodes single or repeatedly encoded values.
- Breaks a full URL into its query parameters as a table.
- Handles "+" as space for form-encoded bodies.
- Reports malformed escape sequences instead of failing silently.
How to use the URL Decoder
- 1Paste the encoded URL or value.
- 2Read the decoded text, plus the parsed parameter table for full URLs.
- 3Decode again if the value was double-encoded.
Frequently asked questions
What is double encoding?
When an already-encoded value is encoded a second time, "%20" becomes "%2520". Run the decoder twice to recover the original.
Why does my decoded text show characters like é or a stray a with a circumflex?
The bytes were written as UTF-8 and then read as Latin-1 somewhere along the way. It is the classic mojibake pattern, and the damage happened before this tool saw the string, so decoding cannot undo it. The fix belongs at whatever produced the URL.
What does a malformed escape sequence mean?
A percent sign not followed by two valid hexadecimal digits. Usually it means a literal % was put into a URL without being written as %25, or a string was cut off mid-escape. This reports where the problem is rather than failing silently, so you can see which one is at fault.
Should I decode the whole URL or just one parameter?
Use the parameter table, which splits the query string and decodes each value on its own. Decoding a whole URL in one pass also converts the structural & and = into literal characters, which makes the result harder to read rather than easier, and can hide where one value ends and the next begins.