I was doing some Content Porting the other day. When moving code up the DTAP street the general practice is to switch off dependency management and, well, manage the dependencies yourself. This is great for a surgical software release, where you know exactly what's in the package and can be sure that you aren't unintentionally releasing something you hadn't planned to, but.... 

Yeah - there's always a but. In this case, you have to make sure that all the items your exported items depend on are present, either in the export or in the target system. Sometimes you miss one, and during the import you get a nice error message saying which item is missing. Unfortunately, the location of the item is given as a WebDAV URL. If the item in question has lots of spaces, quote marks, or other special characters in it, by the time you get to read the URL in all its escaped glory, it can be a complete alphabet soup. 

So there I was, squinting at some horrible URL and mentally parsing out the escape sequences to figure out what I was looking at.. when it dawned on me. Decoding encoded URLs is not work for humans  - we have computers for that. So I fired up my trusty Powershell, thinking "hey, I have the awesome power of the .NET framework at my disposal". As it turns out, the HttpUtility libraries that most devs are familiar with is probably not there in your ordinary desktop OS, but System.Net.WebUtility is. So if you've copied a webdav url into your paste buffer, you can open the shell, type in

[net.webutility]::Ur

From here on tab completion will fill in the rest of UrlDecode, and with one or two more keystrokes and a right-mouse-click you have something like this:

[net.webutility]::UrlDecode("/webdav/Some%20Publication/This%20%26%20that/More%20%22stuff%22%20to%20read/a%20soup%C3%A7on%20of%20something")

and then hitting enter gets you this: 

/webdav/Some Publication/This & that/More "stuff" to read/a soupçon of something

which is much more readable. 

Of course, if even that is too much typing for you, you can stick something like this in your profile: 

function decode ($subject) {
   [net.webutility]::UrlDecode($subject)
}

Of course, none of this is strictly necessary - you can always stare at the WebDAV URLs and decipher them as an exercise in mental agility, but some days you just want the easy life.