Human-readable medium and data

In computing, human-readable data is often encoded as ASCII or Unicode text, rather than as binary data. In most contexts, the alternative to a human-readable representation is a machine-readable format or medium of data primarily designed for reading by electronic, mechanical or optical devices, or computers. For example, Universal Product Code (UPC) barcodes are very difficult to read for humans, but very effective and reliable with the proper equipment, wh

Human readable protocols greatly reduce the cost of debugging.

Various organizations have standardized the definition of human-readable and machine-readable data and how they are applied in their respective fields of application, e.g., the Universal Postal Union.

Often the term human-readable is also used to describe shorter names or strings,

See also

• Self-documenting code: source code that is both machine-readable and human-readable
• Human-readable code
• Machine-Readable Documents
• Machine-readable data
• Data (computing)
• Data conversion
• Hellschreiber
• Human–computer interaction
• Human factors
• Plain text
• quoted-printable