# WhatsApp Link Generator Guide

Turn a phone number and a message into a wa.me click-to-chat link.

- Tool: https://ilham.dev/tools/whatsapp-link-generator/
- Guide URL: https://ilham.dev/guides/whatsapp-link-generator/
- Tool guides index: https://ilham.dev/guides/tools/
- Broader guide: Text Formatting and Cleanup (https://ilham.dev/guides/text-formatting-and-cleanup/)

## What it does

Build a wa.me link that opens a chat with a number and a message already filled in. Enter the country code and the phone number, type the message, and the page writes the click-to-chat link, ready to paste into a page, an email or a QR code.

## Use the tool

Open https://ilham.dev/tools/whatsapp-link-generator/, add the input the tool asks for, run it, and check the output before using it elsewhere.

## Input and output

- Input: text.
- Output: text.
- Category: Web.

## Privacy and processing
Processing happens locally in your browser. This tool does not upload the input to ilham.dev.

## Questions

### Why is the leading zero removed?

wa.me needs the number in international form, which has no national trunk prefix. A local number written 0812 becomes 62812 once the country code is added, so the leading zero is dropped before the two are joined.

### Does the message have to be encoded?

Spaces and punctuation cannot sit raw in a URL, so the message is percent-encoded. That is why a space turns into %20 in the link; WhatsApp decodes it back to a normal space when the chat opens.

### Can I shorten the link?

Not here, because shortening needs a request to a third-party service and this page never sends your text anywhere. Use your own shortener afterwards if you need one.