Reading Encoded URLs

Percent-encoding turns every unsafe character in a URL into a percent sign followed by two hex digits, which is efficient to transmit but nearly unreadable to humans. A link like https%3A%2F%2Fracira.com%2Fcalculator%3Fq%3Dhello%20world is opaque at a glance, yet it decodes cleanly to https://racira.com/calculator?q=hello world. Understanding how to reverse the process matters for debugging web analytics, inspecting API request logs, and recovering the real value behind an obfuscated query parameter.

JavaScript offers two decoders. decodeURI reverses encodeURI: it restores percent sequences but leaves reserved URL characters untouched, which suits entire URLs. decodeURIComponent reverses encodeURIComponent and also converts reserved characters back to their literal form, which suits individual query values. This tool runs both and shows the token-level breakdown — each %XX triplet, reserved symbol, and plain run — so you can see precisely which bytes were encoded and what they became.

Handling Edge Cases

Real-world encoded strings are not always well-formed. A trailing percent sign, a triplet like %ZZ, or an incomplete UTF-8 sequence can cause the strict decoder to throw. This tool performs a lenient decode so you always receive a readable result, counts the percent triplets, and reports the length savings — the number of characters the encoding added. If you are debugging a form submission, remember that form data may use + for spaces; replace + with %20 before decoding to recover the literal plus or space correctly.