A string is an abstract bit of text. You need to <i>encode</i> this into a particular memory representation of the text.<p>Bytes hold a bunch of data in some encoding. It could be an image, UTF-8 or LZMA compressed ASCII. Once you know the encoding, to reconstruct the data you <i>decode</i> into a semantically meaningful form.<p>To put it another way, imagine the terms were &quot;serialize&quot; and &quot;deserialize&quot;. Of course one <i>serializes to</i> and <i>deserializes from</i> binary data. Just replace &quot;{,de}serialize&quot; with &quot;{en,de}code&quot; and you&#x27;re done.