The web is organized around plain text and socket connections between computers. We can not ship the data as it is in our computer’s memory to the other computer for lots of reasons. What we do is translate it (encode it) in a predictable way. A common way on the web is “urlencoding”. Another type of encoding that has become populate in recent years is JSON. That’s the encoding style we’ll use most often in our API requests but for authentication we use “urlencoding”.
The final encode reference in our previous example was to ‘utf-8’. This refers to a character encoding. They way we represent symbols like letters or characters in other langauages like Danish, Hindi or Korean. JSON by specification expects to be ‘utf-8’
So in one case we encode our data into an expected layout and in another we explicitly encode it into a character representation. Both are important.