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Lessons from Plain Text
Written at 2024-10-10 When you interact with a text file using an editor, what you see doesn’t necessarily reflect the data stored in the file. Sure, the contents of plain text files are byte codes encoded in formats like ASCII, UTF8, or UTF16, and these byte codes are the ultimate source of truth.
So, the main goal of this essay is to share some of my experiences and what I’ve learned over time about common problems you might encounter with plain text. If you copy the wrapped text this way and paste it into another application, like your favorite messaging app, it will likely look unpleasant, especially on smaller devices like smartphones. In the case of hard-wrapped text, if you search a sentence that is split across multiple lines, the search/find tools like grep might just fail since they usually operate on a line-by-line basis.
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