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Plain text
In computing, plain text is a loose term for unformatted text or nontextual data represented as text (e.g. file contents) using printable characters (for example letters, digits, symbols, spaces, tabs, line breaks) in a character encoding. In principle, plain text can be in any encoding, but today usually implies UTF-8.
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.).
Plain text is often used as a counterpiece to “binary” files: those in which at least some parts of the file cannot be correctly interpreted as text. For example, a file or string consisting of “hello”, following by 4 bytes that express a binary integer that is supposed to be evaluated in a CPU representation like little endian, is a binary file.
Text files that do not represent anything but text in a character encoding have no indicator of encoding, no magic number, no special marker at the beginning and no metadata marking them as text in most file systems. However their file-names are often marked with.txt at the end by Windows users and other operating systems often assume unidentifiable files to be text. However there is the MIME type “text/plain” that is used for transfer over the internet or between software components.
Printed 2026-06-28.
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