URL decoding is the inverse process of URL encoding. It is used to parse query strings or path parameters passed in URLs. It is also used to decode HTML form parameters that are submitted with application/x-www-form-urlencoded MIME format
URLs, as you might know, can only contain a limited set of characters from the US-ASCII character set. These characters include Alphabets (A-Z a-z), Digits (0-9), hyphen (-), underscore (_), tilde (~), and dot (.). Any character outside this allowed set is encoded using URL encoding or Percent encoding.
This is why, it becomes necessary to decode query strings or path parameters passed in URLs to get the actual values.
You can have URLs with umlauts and other characters not listed above shown in your browser – but if you copy that URL to a text area, it gets “URL encoded” – that’s usually not, what I like to have in that text area, e.g. my text editor. Far to often I fixed those URL encoded strings manually – but recently I came across the tool listed above, and I quite like it for this purpose.
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