Guide 101: All You Need To Know About URL Encoding and Decoding

The URL was initially created to give a clear indication of where a particular Web resource is located. An important and contentious issue about the support for multiple languages on the Web is the internationalisation of URLs. They can be transmitted over the Internet using simply the ASCII character set to prevent improper URL data interpretation.

Insecure ASCII characters in URLs are replaced by a "%" and two hexadecimal digits. RFC 3986 defines characters that do not require escape sequences. To ensure accurate URL transmission and interpretation, you can use the online application of URL encoder and decoder.

What is URL encoding?

URL encoding is the process of substituting specific characters in a URL with one or more character triplets that are made up of the percent sign "%" and two hexadecimal digits. The substituted character's numerical value is represented by the first two hexadecimal digits of the triplet.

The phrase "URL encoding" is somewhat ambiguous because the encoding process can be used to encode any URI (Uniform Resource Identifiers), including URNs, in addition to URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) (Uniform Resource Names). The phrase "percent-encoding" needs to be chosen.

Decoding or encoding the text

It is theoretically feasible to use one of the 8-bit code pages for non-ASCII characters because URL encoding requires a pair of hexadecimal digits, and a pair of hexadecimal digits is equivalent to 8 bits (e.g. ISO-8859-1).

On the other hand, managing all of these many 8-bit code pages would be a very laborious task because numerous languages have their own 8-bit code page. An 8-bit code page cannot even contain some languages (e.g. Chinese). RFC 3629 suggests using the UTF-8 character encoding table for non-ASCII characters as a result.

When do you need to use URL encoding?

The form field names and values are encoded and delivered to the server in an HTTP request message using the method GET or POST, or, traditionally, by email, when data from HTML forms have been submitted. Though you can encode URLs online, the default encoding is based on an early version of the generic URI percent-encoding rules, with some changes like newline normalisation and using "+" instead of "%20" for spaces. Application/x-www-form-urlencoded is the MIME type for data encoded in this manner. It is currently defined in the HTML and XForms specifications. The CGI definition also specifies how web servers should decode this kind of data and make it available to applications.

URL-encoding details

Types of Universal Resource Identifier or URI characters

A URI may only include reserved or unreserved characters (or a percent character as part of a percent encoding). Characters that are sometimes reserved have unique meanings. For instance, various portions of a URL are separated by forward slash characters (or more generally, a URI). There are no such particular meanings for unreserved characters. Reserved characters are represented by unique character sequences when employing percent encoding. With each new revision of the specifications governing URIs and URI schemes, a little adjustment is made to the sets of reserved and unreserved characters as well as the conditions under which specific reserved characters have unique meanings.

Percent-encoding reserved characters

When a URI scheme specifies that a character from the reserved set has to be used for another purpose and the character has a specific meaning (a "reserved purpose") in a particular context, the character must be percent-encoded. A reserved character is percent-encoded by first translating it to its appropriate ASCII byte value, which is then represented as a pair of hexadecimal digits.

Percent-encoding unreserved characters

There is no need to percent-encode characters from the unreserved set when you encode a URL online. By definition, URIs that solely differ in terms of whether an unreserved character is percent-encoded or not are similar. However, in practice, URI processors might not always treat them equally. Consumers of URIs shouldn't regard characters like "%41" or "%7E" differently from letters like "A" or "," yet some do. "%41" is the percent-encoding of "A," for instance. Therefore, the percent encoding of unreserved characters is discouraged for the sake of interoperability.

Percent-encoding arbitrary data

In the majority of URI schemes, arbitrary data, like an IP address or file system path, are represented as URI components. The URI scheme specifications ought to, but frequently do not, list an explicit mapping between the URI characters and any potential data values those characters can stand in for.

What is URL decoding?

The process of URL decoding, which converts a URL that contains special characters into one that doesn't, is the opposite of URL encoding. The address is now simpler to read as a result. A URL that has a hash symbol or pound sign can be easily fixed. Decoding a URL removes any symbols like the pound sign that may have been inadvertently included. This improves the URL's readability for both users and search engines.

How can you decode URLs easily?

1. Input the data of the URL in the text area of "URL for decoding
2. Push the button-”decode” and take the URL from the specific text area
3. After decoding the input string, click in the text area of the output to copy decoded URLs

Why do you need an online tool for URL decoding?

As the examination of query strings or path parameters given in a URL is done via URL decoding, it allows software to represent URL data in its actual and legible format. Decoding renders URL data understandable for a programme that represents URL data in its actual format. However, while using the online tool URL-encode-decode, make sure the tool can perform on all platforms including iOS, Android and Mac OS. A good quality tool does not require software installation or plugins.

Bottom line

Using an online tool for URL encoding and decoding helps to complete the procedure easily as well as quickly. Hence, if you want to encode or decode your data without any hassle and make it in a readable format, you can take help from MySEOtools. You can find details of the URL encoder and decoder on the site.