What is Plain Text?

Plain text here means columns lined up with spaces, the way a command line tool prints a table.

Who uses it

Terminal output, log files, fixed-width exports from older systems.

Reading Plain Text

Two shapes are handled. If the same character positions are blank on every line, those gutters are treated as column boundaries, so values containing single spaces stay intact. Otherwise the lines are split on runs of whitespace.

Writing Plain Text

Columns are padded to the widest value. Width is counted in display columns rather than characters, so a table containing Chinese, Japanese or Korean text still lines up: those glyphs occupy two columns in a monospace font.

What it can hold

plain text is a delimited text format. Columns are held apart by spacing alone, so the alignment is the structure. A machine can read it back, but only by following the conventions rather than a rule the format enforces.

It cannot express

Types. Every value is text. A column of digits is indistinguishable from a column of numbers until something downstream decides to read it as one, which is where a leading zero usually disappears.
A null. An absent value and an empty one look the same, and nothing in the file says which was meant.
Nesting. Cells are flat, so structured values have to be flattened into extra columns or written into one cell as text.
A line break inside a cell. One would end the row, so it has to be replaced before writing.
Any formatting. Bold, colour, column widths and merged cells have nowhere to go.

What it looks like

Example Plain Text

id   name              role           started     hours
007  Halima Yusuf      Analyst, data  2024-03-15  38.5
012  Jonah "Jo" Pryce  Engineer       2025-11-02
104  Wei Chen          Manager        2023-06-30  40

Questions

How do I open Plain Text files?

Any text editor will show you the contents. To read it as a table, paste it into the converter on this site and it appears in an editable grid. Nothing is uploaded.

Is Plain Text a good format for sharing data?

It depends who is receiving it. Terminal output, log files, fixed-width exports from older systems. If the recipient is outside that group, a plain CSV travels further than anything else.