Encoding 101

When you type a message, upload a photo, or visit a website, that content needs to be understood by a computer. The challenge is, as we found out in the first issue, computers don’t understand text, images, or emojis the way we do. They only understand 0s and 1s—binary. But going directly from human-readable content to raw binary would be chaotic and unstructured, as there would be no standard rules. That’s where encoding comes in.

Think of encoding as a bridge between human-readable data and the binary world of computers. It provides a set of rules to turn text, images, or sound into structured data, usually in the form of numbers, that computers can reliably store, share, and reconstruct.

Imagine a Game of Secret Codes

Think back to school days when you and your friends might pass secret messages using a made-up code: A = 1, B = 2, and so on. If you sent “HELLO” as “8-5-12-12-15,” the person on the other side needed to know the exact same code rules to decode your message back into words.

Encoding works just like that. The message isn’t hidden, just translated. Computers use standardised codes, such as ASCII or Unicode (a special version of Unicode called UTF-8), to assign a unique number to every character or symbol.  For example, the letter “H” becomes the number 72, and an emoji like 😊 becomes a longer code, such as 128522. These numbers are then converted into binary for the computer to handle.

Sending Data Over the Internet

Let’s say you’re opening a website. Your browser requests a web page from a server. That page may contain text, images, and emojis. Before this content is sent, it’s encoded—the text using something like UTF-8, and the images using formats like JPEG or PNG.

This encoding ensures that when your browser receives the data, it knows how to decode it properly and display the exact content the website intended. Without encoding, a simple sentence could turn into a jumble of unreadable characters.

Not to Be Confused With Encryption or Compression

It’s easy to mix up encoding with encryption or compression, but they’re pretty different:

• Encoding is about formatting data so systems can understand it.
• Encryption is about hiding data so only authorised people can read it.
• Compression involves shrinking data to reduce its storage space.

Only encoding is focused on clarity and compatibility, not secrecy or size reduction.

Encoding is the unsung hero of digital communication. It’s the translator that lets your devices take your words, images, and ideas—and turn them into structured, machine-readable formats. Without it, the internet as we know it simply wouldn’t work. It ensures that no matter what language or symbol you use, there’s a way to represent it that both you and a computer can understand.