URL Tools

URLs look simple until a value contains a space, an ampersand, a plus sign or a non-Latin character. At that point, encoding once, encoding twice or not encoding at all decides whether a link works, an API call succeeds, or a redirect lands on a 404.

The URL encoder and decoder apply percent-encoding the way browsers do, so you can see what a value will look like on the wire or reverse a string copied from a log. For example, a space becomes %20 and an ampersand inside a value becomes %26. The URL parser splits any URL into its components (scheme, host, port, path, query, fragment) and lists every query parameter in a table. The query string parser focuses on the part after the question mark and handles repeated keys, arrays and nested bracket notation.

Use these tools when you debug OAuth callbacks, tracking parameters, deep links, or any API that passes structured data through the query string.

The network checks go one step further than the URL itself. The redirect checker follows every hop of a 301, 302 or meta refresh chain and shows the status of each. The website down checker probes a site from a neutral network, so you can tell an outage from a problem with your own connection. The DNS propagation checker asks twelve public resolvers for the same record, the WHOIS lookup returns registrar, dates and nameservers for a domain or IP, and the IP tool shows the address and network you are connecting from. These five run on our edge API rather than in your browser, because a browser cannot read redirect headers, open port 43 or query someone else's DNS resolver.