How do I copy an unencoded URL from my browser?

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Whenever I copy and paste URLs from my browser, they end up being percent-encoded and completely unreadable.

For example, the homepage URL of the Japanese version of Wikipedia, https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/メインページ, becomes this monstrosity:

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%A1%E3%82%A4%E3%83%B3%E3%83%9A%E3%83%BC%E3%82%B8

This happens even though the clean version of the URL displays in the browser's address bar.

Is there a quick and easy way to stop this from happening? I'm mostly interested in Edge and Firefox but solutions for other browsers would be appreciated.

urls web-browsers character-encoding

posted almost 2 years ago

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2y ago by Alexei‭

Moshi‭

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Worked for Canina‭

The following users marked this post as Works for me:

User	Comment	Date
Canina‭	(no comment)	Feb 2, 2022 at 14:35

Firefox

Enter about:config in the address bar.
Type "decodeurl" in the search field.
Set browser.urlbar.decodeURLsOnCopy to true.

From the documentation:

browser.urlbar.decodeURLsOnCopy (boolean, default: false)

Whether copying the entire URL from the location bar will put a human readable (percent-decoded) URL on the clipboard.

posted about 1 year ago

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1y ago

Quasímodo‭

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Affects only copying from the location bar (1 comment)

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Worked for Moshi‭

The following users marked this post as Works for me:

User	Comment	Date
Moshi‭	(no comment)	Aug 21, 2022 at 12:27

A few options:

https://www.urldecoder.org/ is a converter for this

If you copy the URL without the https:// part, then it will no longer be recognized as needing to be URL encoded by the browser (works on Edge and I believe all Chromium browsers, I can't speak for others as I haven't used them)

Finally, there are extensions on the Chrome Web Store such as https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/copy-unicode-urls/fnbbfiapefhkicjhecnoepbijhanpkjp that I found on a quick search - I can't speak for any of these either, as I've never used them.

posted almost 2 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0