Oct 21, 2007
URL Decoder and Encoder
This is a great little utility for encoding and decoding URLs. It quickly turns gobbledygook like:
http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Fmilowerx%2Falbumid%2F5123888780136287569%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt%3Drss%26authkey%3D5M3WrH3fEkY"
into something more useable like:
http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/
user/milowerx/albumid/5123888780136287569?
kind=photo&alt=rss&authkey=5M3WrH3fEkY
AND, vice-versa for using URL’s programmatically.
Hey! Wow, two posts in one day… I guess I should buy a lottery ticket or something. 
Why would I need that if the original link works? So it’s shorter like Tinyurl or something?
Good question. The real answer is that both will work for a lot of things, but the second one is much more recognizeable to a human as a URL…
Tinyurl is totaly different – this is just two versions of the same URL. One with the special characters ( / ” ‘ : ) “escaped” for machine reading purposes and the other one with the special characters left in for human reading purposes..
I don’t know, maybe I’m not explaining it well!