All recipes
Recipes
Decode an unknown string
Identify a mystery string's encoding layers and peel them off one at a time until it reads as plain text.
Step 1 of 4
Try the common wrappers
Run it through the Base64 decoder, and percent-decode it if you spot %XX sequences. Recognise the shape before guessing — Base64 is A–Z, a–z, 0–9, +/ (often ending in = padding), while percent-encoding is littered with % signs.