this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2025
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The encoding format of URLs is URL encoding, also known as percent-encoding. Content in the URL may be first encoding in some other format, like JSON or base64, and then encoded additionally using percent-encoding.
While there is a standard way to decode percent-encoding, websites are free to use base64 or JSON in URLs however they wish, so there's not a one-size-fits-all way to decode them all. For example, the "/" character is valid in both percent-encoding and base64-encoding, so to know if it's part of a base64-encoded blob or not, you might end up trying decoding several parts of the URL as base64 and checking if the result looks like URL-- essentially brute force.
A smarter way to do this might be to maintain a mapping between your favorite sites that you want to decode and what methods they use to encode links. Then a tool could efficiently directly decode the URLs embedded in these click trackers.