URL Encode
Make text safe to put in a URL.
About this converter
A URL can only carry a limited set of characters. Everything else — spaces, accents, ampersands, anything non-English — has to be written as a percent sign and two hex digits.
The choice at the top is the one thing that matters here, and getting it wrong is the commonest bug in this area. Encoding a single value escapes the delimiters too, so a search term containing & or = or ? cannot break out and be read as the start of another parameter. Encoding a whole address deliberately leaves those characters alone, because otherwise you destroy the structure of the URL you were trying to make safe.
If you are building ?q=<something>, you want the first. If you have an address with a space in it, you want the second.
Frequently asked questions
Which option do I want?
If the text is going after an = in a query string — a search term, an email address, a redirect target — choose the single value. It escapes & = ? / # so they cannot be mistaken for URL structure. If you have a complete address that just contains spaces or accents, choose whole address, which leaves the structural characters intact.
Why is a space sometimes %20 and sometimes +?
Both appear. Percent-encoding proper uses %20. The + convention comes from HTML form submission, where spaces in application/x-www-form-urlencoded bodies are written as +. %20 is correct everywhere; + is correct only in that one context. This tool produces %20, and the decoder accepts both.
Do I need to encode a URL twice?
Only when one URL is a parameter inside another — a redirect target, typically. Then the inner one is a value, so it gets encoded, and the %s in it get encoded again as %25 when the outer URL is built. Double-encoding by accident is a common cause of links that almost work.
Does what I paste get sent anywhere?
No. The conversion runs in your browser, on your own machine — that is why the result appears as you type rather than after a wait. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is logged, and closing the tab is the end of it. This matters more here than on most pages: tokens, keys and internal data get pasted into tools like this constantly, and most of them are a form that posts to a server.