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How to Use URL Encoder and Decoder to Handle Special Characters

Let's talk about a very common and a slightly strange sight that we have all seen in our web browser's address bar. You've just done a search on a website, or you've clicked on a long and a complicated link from an email, and you look up at the URL. And it is an absolute and a total monster. It is a long and a cryptic-looking mess, and it is full of strange and of weird-looking codes, like %20, %3F, and a whole bunch of other, similar-looking gibberish.

In that moment, your first thought is probably, "What in the world is all of that stuff? Is the URL broken? Did something go wrong?"

The funny and the counter-intuitive truth is that the exact opposite is true. That "gibberish" is actually a very clear sign that things are working perfectly and exactly as they should be. It is a kind of a "secret language" that all of our URLs have to use in order to be able to safely and reliably handle any kind of a special character. This process is called URL encoding. And sometimes, as a web developer or as a digital marketer, you are going to need to be able to manually translate a piece of your own text into this secret language, or you are going to need to translate it back into plain, simple English. And to be able to do that, you do not need to memorize a complex and a secret codebook. You just need a simple online tool to be able to do all of the translation work for you, in just a few seconds.

The "Safe Alphabet" of the Internet

To really understand why we even need this strange, secret language in the first place, we first need to appreciate a very fundamental and a very important limitation of the internet. The "alphabet" of the characters that are considered to be safe and to be valid for use in a URL is actually very, very small and very limited. It is basically just all of the standard, English letters, the numbers 0 through 9, and a few, other, special symbols, like the hyphen, the underscore, and the period.

But what happens when you need to be able to include a character in your URL that is not a part of that very safe and very limited alphabet? The single most common example of this, of course, is a simple space. You cannot have a literal space in the middle of a URL. URL encoding, therefore, is the globally accepted and the standardized way to be able to represent all of these "unsafe" characters by using only the characters that are a part of that "safe" set.

Cracking the Code: How URL Encoding Works

So, how does this secret code actually work? How does a simple space become that weird, %20 that we have all seen? The system is actually very clever and very logical. It is called "percent-encoding."

The way that it works is that each and every one of the "unsafe" characters is replaced by a percent sign (%), and that is then followed by a two-digit, hexadecimal code. That hexadecimal code is the thing that represents that character in the old and the trusty, ASCII table.

Let’s use the classic example of the simple space. The space character has a decimal, ASCII value of 32. The hexadecimal equivalent of the number 32 is the number 20. And so, a simple space becomes the code %20. Let's take another example. A question mark (?) has a special meaning in a URL, so if you want to include it as a piece of text, you have to encode it. Its hexadecimal value is 3F, so it becomes %3F. So, as you can see, it is not just a random and a jumbled mess of gibberish; it is a very logical and a very well-structured, standardized system.

The "Why": Real-World Scenarios for Encoding and Decoding

So, why would you, as a developer or as a marketer, ever need to be able to manually perform this kind of a translation? Well, it turns out that there are a number of very common and very important, real-world scenarios where this is an essential task.

For web developers, this is a huge and an almost daily requirement. A developer might be building a URL for their application, programmatically. For example, they might be building a search URL that looks something like this: mysite.com/search?query=sri lankan food. To be able to make that a valid and a working URL, their code must be able to automatically encode the space that is in the phrase "sri lankan food" so that it becomes sri%20lankan%20food.

For digital marketers, if you are building a URL that has a lot of UTM parameters for your campaign tracking, you will often need to be able to encode any of the values that might contain spaces or any other, special characters. And for everyone, the need to be able to decode a URL is a very common one. You might have copied a long, an ugly, and an encoded link from your browser's address bar. You might want to be able to paste that link into a report or into a social media post, but you first want to be able to get the clean and the human-readable version of it.

The Manual Method: A Trip to the ASCII Table

So, for a moment, let's just imagine that you had to try and do this manual encoding process by hand. It would be an incredibly slow, a very tedious, and a highly error-prone process.

Imagine you just wanted to encode the simple phrase, "Hello World!". First, you would have to go through and you would have to identify all of the "unsafe" characters. In this case, that is the space and the exclamation mark. Then, you would have to go and you would have to look up the decimal, ASCII values for both of those characters in a chart. You would then have to convert both of those decimal values into their hexadecimal equivalents. And finally, you would have to manually and very carefully construct the final, and the correctly encoded, string, which would be Hello%20World%21. As you can see, it is an incredibly slow and a very boring process that no one would ever want to have to do manually.

The Universal Translator: The Online URL Encoder and Decoder

This pressing need for a fast, for an accurate, and for a completely and totally foolproof way to be able to translate our text into and out of this special, URL-safe format is exactly why every single, modern web developer and every savvy, digital marketer has an online URL Encoder and Decoder saved in their virtual toolkit.

This type of tool is a simple but an incredibly powerful, two-way, text utility that completely and totally automates that entire, complex, percent-encoding and decoding process for you. The workflow is an absolute dream. The tool will usually have two, main, and clearly labeled boxes. To be able to encode your text, you just have to type your plain and your human-readable text into the top box and you click the "Encode" button. The tool will then instantly give you the perfectly formatted and the completely safe, URL string. And to be able to decode, you just do the opposite. You paste the long, the ugly, and the percent-encoded string into the other box, you click the "Decode" button, and the tool will instantly give you back the clean and the perfectly readable, plain text. And the fantastic thing is, with the kind of minimalist and lightning-fast tools you can find on toolseel.com, you can handle this absolutely essential, technical task in the blink of an eye.

What to Look For in a Great URL Encoding/Decoding Tool

As you begin to explore these wonderfully simple and useful tools, you'll find that the best and most trustworthy ones are designed to be fast, accurate, and incredibly easy to use. They are built to be a reliable and a powerful part of your development or your marketing workflow. A really top-notch online tool for encoding and for decoding your URLs should have a few key features. It should include:

• A clear, a simple, and a very intuitive, two-way interface that has separate and clearly labeled sections or buttons for both the encoding and the decoding process.
   
• The ability for the tool to be able to correctly and to accurately handle a very wide and a very diverse range of all the different, special and the non-ASCII characters.
   
• An instant, a real-time conversion that, in many cases, will show you the output changing automatically as you are typing.
   
• A simple and a very convenient "copy to clipboard" button for both the encoded and the decoded text, which makes it incredibly easy to grab your final result.
   
• A tool that is fast, that is completely free, and that performs all of the operations securely, right there in your own browser, for your own privacy.
   

A tool with these features is an invaluable asset for any modern, web professional.

The Final Human Touch: Knowing When to Encode

Now for the golden rule, the part of the process that turns a simple tool user into a smart and a strategic professional. The online tool is incredibly simple to use. But you, the human, need to be the one who knows when and why you should be using it.

There are three, simple rules to remember. Rule number one: if you are a developer and you are building a URL, and you need to be able to include a piece of text as a parameter in that URL, you must always encode that text first. Rule number two: if you have received a long and an encoded URL and you need to be able to see the clean and the original text, for the purposes of readability or for you to be able to use it in a document, then you need to decode it. And rule number three: the tool is the thing that handles the "how"; your deep understanding of your own, specific task is the thing that determines the "when" and the "why." You are the one who needs to know if you are currently in the process of building a URL or of reading one.

Speaking the Universal Language of the Web

Let’s be honest, the URLs that are the very backbone of our entire internet have a very strict and a very limited, "safe alphabet." And URL encoding is the essential, and the universal, "secret language" that allows us to be able to safely and to reliably include all of our special characters. An online encoder and a decoder is the instant and the foolproof, digital translator that makes this entire, special language completely and totally accessible to absolutely everyone.

So, don't ever be intimidated by those long and those ugly-looking URLs that are full of all of those different percentage signs. They are not broken; they are just speaking the safe and the universal language of the web. And don't ever waste your precious time trying to build them by hand. By using a simple online tool, you can become a fluent and a confident translator, and you can effortlessly encode and decode all of your URLs, whenever you need to.