URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) are the addresses used to access web pages and resources on the internet. Sometimes, URLs may contain special characters or spaces that need to be encoded in order to be properly understood by web browsers and servers. Encoding a URL means converting special characters into a format that can be safely transmitted and understood by computers. On the other hand, decoding a URL means converting the encoded characters back to their original form.
URL decoding is the process of converting an encoded URL back to its original form by replacing the percent-encoded characters with their corresponding special characters.
If we have the following encoded URL:
https://www.example.com/page?title=How%20to%20Encode%20URLs
To decode this URL, we replace "%20" with a space. The decoded URL would be:
https://www.example.com/page?title=How to Encode URLs