Encode

To encode is to transform a piece of data, from a human readable format to a specialized format.

The conversion is lossless, and shall be reverted with a decode operation.

<?php

    // convert an array to a JSON string
    // This is also called 'encoding', and may be decoded
    $array = ['a' => 1];
    $json = json_encode($array);

    $original = json_decode($json);

?>

Documentation

See also PHP: Useful Encoding and decoding Functions You Need to Know.

Related : Decode, Convert