Is Encoding the same as Escaping?

I am interested in theory on whether Encoding is the same as Escaping? According to Wikipedia

an escape character is a character which invokes an alternative interpretation on subsequent characters in a character sequence.

My current thought is that they are different. Escaping is when you place an escape charater in front of a metacharacter(s) to mark it/them as to behave differently than what they would have normally.

Encoding, on the other hand, is all about transforming data in开发者_高级运维to another form, and upon wanting to read the original content it is decoded back to its original form.

Escaping is a subset of encoding: You only encode certain characters by prefixing a special character instead of transferring (typically all or many) characters to another representation.

Escaping examples:

• In an SQL statement: ... WHERE name='O\' Reilly'
• In the shell: ls Thirty\ Seconds\ *
• Many programming languages: "\"Test\" string (or """Test""")

Encoding examples:

• Replacing < with < when outputting user input in HTML
• The character encoding, like UTF-8
• Using sequences that do not include the desired character, like \u0061 for a

They're different, and I think you're getting the distinction correctly.

Encoding is when you transform between a logical representation of a text ("logical string", e.g. Unicode) into a well-defined sequence of binary digits ("physical string", e.g. ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16). Escaping is a special character (typically the backslash: '\') which initiates a different interpretation of the character(s) following the escape character; escaping is necessary when you need to encode a larger number of symbols to a smaller number of distinct (and finite) bit sequences.

They are indeed different.

You pretty much got it right.