You paste a URL into a message and the recipient gets a broken link. You copy a query parameter and it contains %20 everywhere a space should be. You build a web form and special characters in the input break your API call. URL encoding and decoding fixes all of these. Here's how to do it instantly at Ultimate Tools . Why URLs can't contain certain characters URLs are restricted to a specific set of safe characters: letters (A–Z, a–z), digits (0–9), and a handful of symbols ( - , _ , . , ~ ). Everything else — spaces, ampersands, question marks, equals signs, slashes, Unicode characters — must be encoded before appearing in a URL. The encoding format is percent-encoding : each unsafe character is replaced with a % followed by its two-digit hexadecimal ASCII code. Character Encoded Reason reserved Space %20 Terminates URLs in many parsers & %26 Separates query parameters = %3D Separates key from value in query params ?…