Comment by d-us-vb
5 hours ago
I feel like that isn’t exactly a very useful definition of plaintext. If you mean “ASCII” say ASCII.
Plain text is text intended to be interpreted as bytes that map simply to characters. Complexity is irrelevant.
5 hours ago
I feel like that isn’t exactly a very useful definition of plaintext. If you mean “ASCII” say ASCII.
Plain text is text intended to be interpreted as bytes that map simply to characters. Complexity is irrelevant.
Unfortunately no, Unicode is not simply a mapping of bytes to characters. It is a mapping of numbers to code points, and in some cases you can even get the same characters with multiple code point sequences (not a very good mapping!). Then you need to convert numbers to bytes, so aside from Unicode you also need an encoding. And there are multiple choices. So what would be "plain text" then? UTF-16? UTF-8? If so, with or without BOM? It can't be all of them. For something to really be "plain text" it has to be the same thing to everyone...