plain text

alternative plaintext

1. uncountablecomputingText or any data that is to be encrypted (as opposed to ciphertext).

   Using the sophisticated code was useless since the spy merely stole the plain text from the waste basket.

2. uncountablefile formatHuman readable text which consists only of a string of characters, represented using a character encoding such as ASCII or Unicode. In the file format sense, plain text may represent structured data in a human readable format such as XML.

   This simple flat-file database has proven valuable as a way of maintaining and accessing an inventory file and an address file. The data file is a plain text file containing no control characters aside from new lines. The file is therefore easy to create and maintain using ordinary text editors

   1988, Michael M. McDonnell, A simple computer data base system for UNIX

   Synonyms: text file

3. uncountablecomputingData which consists only of human-readable unformatted text, as opposed to machine-readable binary data or formatted/structured text. In this sense, the character data in between XML tags may be called "plain text".

alternative plaintext

1. alternativenot comparablecomputingAlternative spelling of plaintext.