seeking bitcoin encryption details

[LanYu]

I have a few questions regarding the details on bitcoin wallet encryption for the original bitcoin wallet.

1) what encoding standard is used for the passphrase? By this I mean how is the text entered encoded i.e. utf-8 etc.
2) is there a way to manually check the decryption of a wallet without submitting requests to the server?

[flatfly]

You'll need to be more specific because the answers depend...

- What wallet software are you talking about?
- When you say encoding, do you actually mean encryption?