URL Decoder

A marketing tracking link, a redirect parameter, or a URL captured from a server log commonly arrives as a long string of percent-escapes that is unreadable at a glance — decoding it reveals the actual destination, search term, or data the link is carrying, which is often the fastest way to understand what a suspicious or unfamiliar link actually does before clicking it, or to reconstruct what a user searched for from a logged request URL.

A single accented character or emoji encoded into a URL frequently produces several consecutive percent-escapes rather than one — é becomes `%C3%A9`, two escaped bytes representing its UTF-8 encoding, and an emoji can produce four. Decoding correctly means recombining those multi-byte UTF-8 sequences back into the single character they represent, rather than naively converting each `%XX` escape into its own separate character, which would produce mangled, unreadable output for anything outside the basic ASCII range.

Because a real URL captured from a log, an email link, or a browser address bar might use either the standard `%20` or the older form-encoding `+` to represent a space, this tool checks for and correctly converts both back into a literal space rather than only recognising one — pasting a query string that used `+` separators does not require converting it to `%20` first just to get a readable result.