This decrypt and decode word is used by most of the people. But whenever i asked them about "what is the difference between decode and decrypt?" No one is able to answer perfectly way that i wanted to hear. Can i be clear about this?
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Decoding does not require a 'secret' key to get back to the original state. – leppie Aug 25 '15 at 11:12
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1reffer this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4657416/difference-between-encoding-and-encryption – ashishmaurya Aug 25 '15 at 11:15
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Decoding 'CA' to 'California' or 'Canada' does not require decryption but does require decoding. – Jonathan Leffler Aug 25 '15 at 11:16
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Encrypting and decrypting are used to hide something (a secret message), while encoding and decoding are used to bring an information into a specific form (e.g. to send it over an internet connection).
So encryption is part of cryptography and usually relies on a secret key. Only with this key one can decrypt the message read the original message.
An example for encoding is the URL to open a web page. In this URL some characters have a special meaning like the ?& characters. If you want to pass those characters as a parameter you have to encode them, so the browser doesn't interpret them. The urlencode() function is a good place to get more information.
Another good example for encoding is the UTF-8 standard. Surely you know the ASCII table, where you can represent 256 characters with one byte. The UTF-8 encoding allows us to represent much more characters, but of course, you cannot do this with a single byte. The UTF-8 encoding defines when to use 1 or 2 or 3 bytes, and how a reader can recognize those 3-byte characters.
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