Plain text
Plain text is character data represented without rich formatting, markup, layout instructions, or presentation metadata.
Grokking Relational Database Design
Plain text is data stored in a directly readable, unencoded form.
- How it is used
- Protects sensitive database values by identifying plain-text storage that should be replaced with encryption or hashing.
- How deep it goes
- Explains password hashing, ASCII encoding, and column resizing, but does not detail how hashing algorithms are implemented.
- Examples
- Uses a user.password column changing from VARCHAR(20) plain passwords to CHAR(60) encoded bcrypt hashes.
- What you can do after
- Apply it via bcrypt and schema changes to avoid storing passwords as plain text.
Read how Grokking Relational Database Design explains plain text →
Python How-To
A text file is a persistent file that stores character data in an encoding intended to represent textual content.
- How it is used
- Uses plain text for programmatic file processing, including data preparation for tools such as pandas.
- How deep it goes
- Explains opening, reading, encoding, closing, and context-managed cleanup, while deferring detailed processing methods to other techniques.
- Examples
- Uses a tasks.txt file containing comma-separated task identifiers, titles, and urgency levels.
- What you can do after
- Operate/configure Python file access with `open`, `read`, `close`, and `with` for safely processing textual data.
Related concepts
- file objectkind of · A file object is a program-accessible representation of an open file or stream, including its access state and input/output operations.
- CSVincludes · CSV is a plain-text format for tabular data, representing records as rows and fields as values separated by delimiters, conventionally commas, with quoting conventions for special content.
- binary datakind of · Binary data is information represented as sequences of bytes rather than character-oriented text.
- Out-Fileused by · Out-File is a PowerShell cmdlet that writes command output to a file.
- ChatGPTused by · ChatGPT is OpenAI’s conversational AI service, which lets users interact with generative AI models and related tools through natural-language prompts.
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