Some characters (like non-printing characters) are invalid in URLs. Other characters (like &) can't be placed in a URL querystring without changing the meaning of that querystring.

Problems with these characters can all be fixed by 'escaping' them. This process involves scanning the text for those characters, and replacing them with a special character-code that browsers can interpret as the correct symbol, without actually using that symbol in your URL.

For example, the escaped character code for '=' is '%3d'.

Most web platforms have some way of manually encoding and decoding this escaped format. If not, you can use our online URL Encoder and Decoder to do the job.