What is the Difference between Decode and Decrypt?

Question

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?

Decoding does not require a 'secret' key to get back to the original state. — leppie, Aug 25 '15 at 11:12
reffer this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4657416/difference-between-encoding-and-encryption — ashishmaurya, Aug 25 '15 at 11:15
Decoding 'CA' to 'California' or 'Canada' does not require decryption but does require decoding. — Jonathan Leffler, Aug 25 '15 at 11:16

score 4 · Answer 1 · edited Aug 27 '18 at 02:41

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.

Can I be more specific by an example? – Xravn Aug 25 '15 at 11:21 — Xravn, Aug 25 '15 at 11:21
NIT: ASCII only defines the values 0..127 :} – user2864740 Feb 14 '18 at 22:45 — user2864740, Feb 14 '18 at 22:45

What is the Difference between Decode and Decrypt?

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