Created by Iain Ferguson, last modified on Jul 21, 2021

A number of commands return results in the form of formatted Plain Text. In computing, plain text is a loose term for data (e.g. file contents) that represent only characters of readable material. This allows any viewer that can read plain text can read the returned results, for example “notepad.exe”. This plain text is formatted into a number of standard will recognised formats, these being:

  • Human readable Text

  • Comma Separated Values (CSV)

  • JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)

  • Extensible Mark-up Language (XML)

  • Hyper-Text Mark-up Language (HTML)

Human readable Text

A human-readable medium or human-readable format is any encoding of data or information that can be naturally read by humans. In computing, human-readable data is often encoded as text, rather than as binary data. ImgArchive uses this as the default format if one is not specified.

Comma Separated Values format (CSV)

A comma-separated values (CSV) file is a delimited text file that uses a comma to separate values. Each line of the file is a data record. Each record consists of one or more fields, separated by commas. The use of the comma as a field separator is the source of the name for this file format. A CSV file typically stores tabular data (numbers and text) in plain text, in which case each line will have the same number of fields.

The term "CSV" also denotes several closely related delimiter-separated formats that use other field delimiters, for example, ImgArchive may use ‘:' or '|'.

JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)

JavaScript Object Notation is a schema-less, representation of structured data that is based on key-value pairs and ordered lists. Although JSON is derived from JavaScript, it is supported either natively or through libraries in most major programming languages. JSON is commonly, but not exclusively, used to exchange information between web clients and web servers. This is why ImgArchive supports this format allowing ImaArchive to be integrated into the WEB.

Extensible Mark-up Language (XML)

XML is one of the most widely-used formats for sharing structured information today: between programs, between people, between computers and people, both locally and across networks.

If you are already familiar with HTML, you can see that XML is very similar. However, the syntax rules of XML are strict: XML tools will not process files that contain errors, but instead will give you error messages so that you fix them. This means that almost all XML documents can be processed reliably by computer software.

Hyper-Text Mark-up Language (HTML)

HTML is the standard mark-up language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScript.

Web browsers receive HTML documents from a web server or from local storage and render the documents into multimedia web pages. HTML describes the structure of a web page semantically and originally included cues for the appearance of the document. ImgArchive provides this output to allow generated output to displayed directly in a Web site.