Xml Escaping/Encoding terminology

Question

I'm confused as for the difference between the terms "escaping" and "encoding" in phrases like:

Xml Encoding

Xml Escaping

Encoded Html

Escaped Url

...

Can anyone explain it to me?

Answer 1

Encoding describes how the file's characters are physically written in binary (as in Unicode or ANSI).

Escaping refers to the process of replacing special characters (such as < and >) with their XML entity equivalent (such as < and >). For URLs, escaping refers to replacing characters with strings starting with %, such as %20 for a single whitespace.

Escaping differs by language, but encodings are usually widely-accepted standards. Sometimes the terms are used ambiguously (particularly with encoding used to mean escaping), but they are well defined and distinct.