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Concept
Plain text
Summary
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. 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 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 any encoding), following by 4 bytes that express a binary integer that is not a character, is a binary file. Converting a plain text file to a different character encoding does not change the meaning of the text, as long as the correct character encoding is used. However, converting a binary file to a different format may alter the interpretation of the non-textual data.
According to The Unicode Standard:
"Plain text is a pure sequence of character codes; plain Un-encoded text is therefore a sequence of Unicode character codes.
Official source
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Text editor
A text editor is a type of computer program that edits plain text. Such programs are sometimes known as "notepad" software (e.g. Windows Notepad). Text editors are provided with operating systems and software development packages, and can be used to change files such as s, documentation files and programming language source code. Plain text and Rich text There are important differences between plain text (created and edited by text editors) and rich text (such as that created by word processors or desktop publishing software).
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling information to be shared over the Internet through simplified ways meant to appeal to users beyond IT specialists and hobbyists, as well as documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet according to specific rules, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web servers and can be accessed by programs such as web browsers.
File format
A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a . It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary or free. Some file formats are designed for very particular types of data: PNG files, for example, store bitmapped using lossless data compression. Other file formats, however, are designed for storage of several different types of data: the Ogg format can act as a container for different types of multimedia including any combination of audio and video, with or without text (such as subtitles), and metadata.