# What is URL Encoding?
When browsing the internet or sending requests to servers, it is common to think of a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) as simply a "web address". However, internet protocol dictates that URLs can only be transmitted using a very restricted set of standard ASCII characters.What happens if the URL contains a space, accented letters, or special parameters such as plus (+) or equals (=) signs? To prevent systems from collapsing when trying to read illegal characters, these must be translated to their safe compatible form using Percent-Encoding.# How Percent-Encoding Works
When you use this tool, the algorithm takes any "unsafe" character (such as a space or an accented letter like ñ) and replaces it with a percent sign% followed by two hexadecimal digits corresponding to its value in the UTF-8 standard.- Basic Example: A simple space will be replaced by its safe equivalent:
%20. - Extended Support: The letter
ábecomes%C3%A1, andñbecomes%C3%B1.
# Importance in APIs and GET Requests
When developing integrations, a typical mistake is passing a raw string to URL parameters. If you insertshirt&blue raw into your backend (/search?q=shirt&blue), the server will interpret blue as a new parameter, breaking all the logic.This tool performs clean, automatic calculations in your local browser. None of your URL strings need to be transmitted to third-party servers, which helps keep your tokens and analytics parameters private.