Is Encoding the same as Escaping?

Question

I am interested in theory on whether Encoding is the same as Escaping? According to Wikipedia

an escape character is a character which invokes an alternative interpretation on subsequent characters in a character sequence.

My current thought is that they are different. Escaping is when you place an escape charater in front of a metacharacter(s) to mark it/them as to behave differently than what they would have normally.

Encoding, on the other hand, is all about transforming data into another form, and upon wanting to read the original content it is decoded back to its original form.

Answer 1

They're different, and I think you're getting the distinction correctly.

Encoding is when you transform between a logical representation of a text ("logical string", e.g. Unicode) into a well-defined sequence of binary digits ("physical string", e.g. ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16). Escaping is a special character (typically the backslash: '\') which initiates a different interpretation of the character(s) following the escape character; escaping is necessary when you need to encode a larger number of symbols to a smaller number of distinct (and finite) bit sequences.