Question 1

What is percent-encoding?

Accepted Answer

Percent-encoding (also called URL encoding) replaces a character with % followed by its two-digit hexadecimal byte value, repeated for each byte of its UTF-8 representation. It's how a URL can carry a space (%20), an ampersand (%26), or an emoji without those characters being confused for part of the URL's own syntax.

Question 2

What's the difference between encodeURIComponent and encodeURI?

Accepted Answer

encodeURIComponent escapes everything except a small set of unreserved characters, which makes it the right choice for a single value - a query parameter or a path segment - because it also escapes characters like & and = that would otherwise be read as URL structure. encodeURI is meant for an entire URL: it leaves structural characters like :, /, ?, &, and # alone so the URL keeps working, and only escapes characters a URL genuinely can't contain, like spaces. Running an entire URL through encodeURIComponent breaks it, since it would also escape the slashes and colons.

Question 3

Should I still use escape() and unescape()?

Accepted Answer

No. Both were deprecated in the very first edition of the JavaScript standard that also introduced encodeURIComponent, because escape() doesn't encode non-ASCII characters the way HTTP and modern URLs expect - it uses a non-standard %uXXXX form for anything outside Latin-1 that decodeURIComponent can't read back. This tool keeps the option only so you can inspect what a legacy system produced.

Question 4

Why does a + in a query string turn into a space?

Accepted Answer

Query strings historically come from HTML form submissions, which use the application/x-www-form-urlencoded format: it encodes a literal space as + instead of %20, and both of those are treated as a space when this tool's parser (and JavaScript's URLSearchParams) decode them. If you actually need a literal plus sign in a value, it must itself be percent-encoded as %2B.

Question 5

What happens with a repeated parameter like ?tag=a&tag=b?

Accepted Answer

Nothing is lost - this tool preserves every occurrence, in order, as its own row in the query parameter table, exactly the way most server frameworks collect a repeated key into a list. Editing or removing one row leaves the others untouched.

Question 6

Why did the parser assume https:// for my URL?

Accepted Answer

A string like example.com/path has no protocol, so a browser (and this tool) can't tell whether it's a web address, meant for another protocol, or just plain text. Rather than reject it, the parser assumes https:// so you can still inspect and edit it - a hint appears whenever that happens, and you can correct the Protocol field if a different scheme was intended.

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URL Encoder & Parser

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