plain text
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See also: plaintext
English
[edit]Alternative forms
[edit]- plaintext usually a single compound word in cryptography.
Pronunciation
[edit]- Rhymes: -ɛkst
Noun
[edit]- (cryptography) Text 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.
- (file format) Human 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.
- 1988, Michael M. McDonnell, A simple computer data base system for UNIX[1]:
- 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
- (computing) Data 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".
Synonyms
[edit]Antonyms
[edit]- (cryptography) ciphertext, (computing) rich text
Translations
[edit]unencrypted text — see cleartext
data that consists only of human-readable text
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Adjective
[edit]plain text (not comparable)
- (cryptography, computing) Alternative spelling of plaintext