plain text

Noun

plain text (uncountable)

1. 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.
2. (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.
   • 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 editors1988, Michael M. McDonnell, A simple computer data base system for UNIX

   Synonyms:

   text file

3. 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".