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Plain Text

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18 views1 page

Plain Text

Uploaded by

Gold Pari
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as TXT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
Download as txt, pdf, or txt
Download as txt, pdf, or txt
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In computing, plain text is a loose term for data (e.g.

file contents) that


represent only characters of readable material but not its graphical representation
nor other objects (floating-point numbers, images, etc.). It may also include a
limited number of "whitespace" characters that affect simple arrangement of text,
such as spaces, line breaks, or tabulation characters (although tab characters can
"mean" many different things, so are hardly "plain"). Plain text is different from
formatted text, where style information is included; from structured text, where
structural parts of the document such as paragraphs, sections, and the like are
identified; and from binary files in which some portions must be interpreted as
binary objects (encoded integers, real numbers, images, etc.).

The term is sometimes used quite loosely, to mean files that contain only
"readable" content (or just files with nothing that the speaker doesn't prefer).
For example, that could exclude any indication of fonts or layout (such as markup,
markdown, or even tabs); characters such as curly quotes, non-breaking spaces, soft
hyphens, em dashes, and/or ligatures; or other things.

In principle, plain text can be in any encoding, but occasionally the term is taken
to imply ASCII. As Unicode-based encodings such as UTF-8 and UTF-16 become more
common, that usage may be shrinking.

Plain text is also sometimes used only to exclude "binary" files: those in which at
least some parts of the file cannot be correctly interpreted via the character
encoding in effect. For example, a file or string consisting of "hello" (in
whatever encoding), following by 4 bytes that express a binary integer that is not
just a character(s), is a binary file, not plain text by even the loosest common
usages. Put another way, translating a plain text file to a character encoding that
uses entirely different numbers to represent characters does not change the meaning
(so long as you know what encoding is in use), but for binary files such a
conversion does change the meaning of at least some parts of the file.

Contents
1 Plain text and rich text
2 Usage
3 Encoding
3.1 Character encodings
3.2 Control codes
4 See also
5 References

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