Type on either side — the other updates live. Component mode percent-encodes every reserved character; Full URL mode keeps the address structure intact. UTF-8 safe. Everything runs locally.
ClipGate's local classifier recognises URLs the moment you copy one — so you can later paste just the host, just the path, or just a query param. The box above runs the same classifier on whatever you type.
Percent-encoding is how URLs carry arbitrary text without breaking their own syntax. A byte that would otherwise clash with a URL delimiter (or isn't ASCII) is replaced with % followed by its two-digit hex value in UTF-8. Component mode encodes every reserved character so a single value can sit safely inside a query string; Full URL mode leaves delimiters alone so a whole address stays a working address.
URL percent-encoding (RFC 3986) replaces characters that are unsafe or reserved in URLs with %XX — a percent sign plus two hex digits representing the byte value in UTF-8. A space becomes %20; & becomes %26; an em-dash becomes %E2%80%94 (three bytes, because it's multi-byte UTF-8).
Use Component when you're encoding a single value you're about to stuff into a URL — a search query, a path segment, a form field. It percent-encodes :/?#[]@!$&'()*+,;= so your value can't accidentally look like URL structure. Use Full URL when you already have a complete address and just need to clean up spaces and non-ASCII bytes without breaking the ?, #, or / separators.
+-for-space comes from the older application/x-www-form-urlencoded MIME type used by HTML form submissions. RFC 3986 URL encoding uses %20 everywhere, and that's what JavaScript's encodeURIComponent produces. Most servers accept both inside a query string, but + has no special meaning in a URL path or fragment — so %20 is the universally-safe choice.
A lone % or a % followed by non-hex characters (e.g. %ZZ) is invalid and can't be decoded. When that happens we show an inline error under the affected panel and leave the other side as-is, so you don't lose what you had. Fix the bad sequence and it'll resolve automatically.
The ClipGate team. We build a local-first clipboard vault CLI for developers that auto-classifies every copy and blocks paste of secrets. These free tools — JWT decoder, URL encoder, and more — extend the same philosophy to common developer workflows: ad-free, client-side, dark by default.