A string in Python is a sequence of Unicode code points (in range U+0000–U+10FFFF). To store or transfer a string, it needs to be serialized as a sequence of bytes.

Serializing a string into a sequence of bytes is known as “encoding”, and recreating the string from the sequence of bytes is known as “decoding”.

There are a variety of different text serialization codecs, which are collectively referred to as “text encodings”.