Escapology: how, when and why to encode and escape
As programmers, we spend a lot of time just carting data from one place to another. Sometimes that’s the entire purpose of a program or library (data conversion whatevers), but more often it’s just something that needs to happen in the course of getting a certain task done. When we’re sending a request, using a library, executing templates or whatever, it’s important to be 100% clear on the format of the data, which is a fancy way of saying how the data is encoded.
Let’s do the tacky dictionary thing:
encoding (plural encodings)
(computing) The way in which symbols are mapped onto bytes, e.g. in the rendering of a particular font, or in the mapping from keyboard input into visual text.
A conversion of plain text into a code or cypher form (for decoding by the recipient).
I think these senses are a bit too specific—if your data is in a computer in any form, then it’s already encoded. The keyboard doesn’t even have to come into it.
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