Most URL encoders online only offer one button, usually wired to
encodeURIComponent, and call it a day. That’s correct for encoding a
single query value — but run a whole link through it and it mangles the
:// and every & in the process, turning a working URL into a broken
string. Our URL Encoder/Decoder keeps the two
jobs separate on purpose.
- Component mode —
encodeURIComponent/decodeURIComponent. Escapes every character with special meaning in a URL, including& = ? /. Use this for a value that’s going to be inserted into a URL someone else is building, like a search term or a redirect target. - Full URL mode —
encodeURI/decodeURI. Preserves the structural characters that make a URL work, only escaping what’s genuinely invalid (spaces, raw Unicode). Use this for an entire, standalone link. - Honest errors — decoding malformed percent-encoding (a stray
%not followed by two hex digits) throws aURIErrorunder the hood; we catch it and explain what’s wrong instead of showing a blank result. - Copy button, private by default — one click copies the result, and nothing you type is ever sent anywhere or written into the URL.
Try it with a real link that has a query string, and watch Component and Full URL mode produce genuinely different — both correct — results. If you build tools or docs, it’s also embeddable with one iframe.