How can you tell the type of encoding being used? $2y$05$68LWs2pXiEvhVTacJ9PX/elfa1zq9jCBlv61hEw1pCvAHlaJyeMwW

This hash value is 70 characters long. How can I tell what type of encoding was used to generate it? Also, how many bits does each character hold?
That looks like bcrypt.

There are four parts:


$2y - identifier that this is bcrypt in modular crypt format.
$05 - number of key expansion rounds: in this case, it is 25
68LWs...X/e - this is the salt. A total of 128 bits encoded in base64.
lfa1z...MwW - this is the hash. A total of 184 bits encoded in base64.


Since base64 encodes three bytes to four base64 characters, you get 6 bits for each base64 character.