Why is my WhatsApp link full of codes like %D9%85 instead of my Arabic text, and will the customer see them?
The link is fine, and the customer will not see those codes. Links can only carry a limited set of Latin characters, so an Arabic message is written in a special encoding that turns each letter into codes starting with %. When the link opens, WhatsApp decodes it and your message appears in the message box in Arabic, exactly as you wrote it.
What you are looking at
Type «مرحبا» in the message box of the WhatsApp link generator and you will find this at the end of the link:
?text=%D9%85%D8%B1%D8%AD%D8%A8%D8%A7
Each pair of characters after a % is one byte, and an Arabic letter is stored in two bytes. So م became %D9%85, ر became %D8%B1, and so on. Five Arabic letters became 30 characters. This is called percent-encoding, and it is the standard way to put any non-Latin text inside a link.
Can the customer ever see the codes?
Not in normal use. The customer taps the link and WhatsApp decodes it before placing the text in the message box. What a customer might see is the link itself, if you post it as visible text in an SMS or a comment. So if the link will be on show, put it behind a button or a word, use a QR code, or keep the message short.
The price of encoding: length
We ran the same message in both languages through the tool:
- «مرحبًا، أود الاستفسار عن عطر العود 50 مل»: 40 characters, and the full link is 241 characters.
- Hi, I would like to ask about the 50 ml oud perfume: 51 characters, and the full link is 107.
The English message is eleven characters longer, yet its link is less than half the length of the Arabic one. English letters and digits stay as they are and only spaces become %20, while every Arabic letter becomes six characters. Notice too that the 50 in the Arabic message stayed 50 in the link.
Do not edit the codes by hand
To change a word in the message, edit it in the tool's message box and copy the new link. Editing codes inside the link by hand can break a letter: delete one character from %D9%85 and the letter becomes meaningless, so the customer sees a box or a question mark in its place. If someone sends you an encoded link and you want to read its message, paste the part after text= into the URL encoder/decoder and choose decode.
Common questions
Do the codes mean the link is unsafe?
No. They are a standard way of writing text inside links and hide nothing. Any decoder turns them back into the original text.
Do the codes differ from phone to phone?
No. The encoding is fixed, so the same message gives the same codes on any device and decodes to the same text.