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How do I copy an unencoded URL from my browser?
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:
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.
2 answers
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:configin the address bar. - Type "decodeurl" in the search field.
- Set
browser.urlbar.decodeURLsOnCopyto 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.
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.

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