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The term "human-readable" refers to a representation of data
DATA

Debt, AIDS, Trade in Africa is a multinational Non-governmental organization founded in January 2002 in London by U2's Bono along with Robert Sargent Shriver III and activists from the Jubilee 2000 Drop the Debt campaign....
 that can be naturally read
Reading (process)

Reading is a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols for the purpose of deriving meaning and/or constructing meaning. Written information is received by the retina, processed by the primary visual cortex, and interpreted in Wernicke's area....
 by human
Human

A human being, also human or man, is a member of a species of bipedalism primates in the family Hominidae . Mitochondrial DNA evidence indicates that modern humans originated in east Africa about 200,000 years ago....
s. In most contexts, the alternative representation is a machine-readable format or medium of data primarily designed for reading by electronic, mechanical or optical devices, or computer
Computer

A computer is a machine that manipulates Data according to a list of Code .The first devices that resemble modern computers date to the mid-20th century , although the computer concept and various machines similar to computers existed earlier....
s. For example, UPC
Universal Product Code

The Universal Product Code is a barcode#Symbologies , that is widely used in the United States and Canada for tracking trade items in stores....
 barcode
Barcode

A bar code is an optical machine-readable representation of data. Originally, bar codes represented data in the widths and the spacings of parallel lines and may be referred to as linear or 1D barcodes or symbologies....
s are very difficult to read for humans, but very effective and reliable with the proper equipment, whereas the strings of numeral
Numeral

The term numeral can refer to:* Numeral system, a system of mathematical notation for writing numbers* Number names, the words used in a language or writing system to represent numbers...
s that commonly accompany the label are the human-readable form of the barcode's data.






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The term "human-readable" refers to a representation of data
DATA

Debt, AIDS, Trade in Africa is a multinational Non-governmental organization founded in January 2002 in London by U2's Bono along with Robert Sargent Shriver III and activists from the Jubilee 2000 Drop the Debt campaign....
 that can be naturally read
Reading (process)

Reading is a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols for the purpose of deriving meaning and/or constructing meaning. Written information is received by the retina, processed by the primary visual cortex, and interpreted in Wernicke's area....
 by human
Human

A human being, also human or man, is a member of a species of bipedalism primates in the family Hominidae . Mitochondrial DNA evidence indicates that modern humans originated in east Africa about 200,000 years ago....
s. In most contexts, the alternative representation is a machine-readable format or medium of data primarily designed for reading by electronic, mechanical or optical devices, or computer
Computer

A computer is a machine that manipulates Data according to a list of Code .The first devices that resemble modern computers date to the mid-20th century , although the computer concept and various machines similar to computers existed earlier....
s. For example, UPC
Universal Product Code

The Universal Product Code is a barcode#Symbologies , that is widely used in the United States and Canada for tracking trade items in stores....
 barcode
Barcode

A bar code is an optical machine-readable representation of data. Originally, bar codes represented data in the widths and the spacings of parallel lines and may be referred to as linear or 1D barcodes or symbologies....
s are very difficult to read for humans, but very effective and reliable with the proper equipment, whereas the strings of numeral
Numeral

The term numeral can refer to:* Numeral system, a system of mathematical notation for writing numbers* Number names, the words used in a language or writing system to represent numbers...
s that commonly accompany the label are the human-readable form of the barcode's data. In many jurisdictions, barcode labels used in retail shopping must also include a human-readable price on the merchandise.

In computing
Computing

Computing is usually defined as the activity of using and developing computer technology, computer hardware and computer software. It is the computer-specific part of information technology....
, the phrase human-readable refers to data shown in a format easily read by most humans—normally encoded as ASCII
ASCII

American Standard Code for Information Interchange , is a coding standard that can be used for interchanging information, if the information is expressed mainly by the written form of English words....
 or Unicode
Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate Character expressed in most of the world's writing systems....
 text, rather than binary
Binary file

A binary file is a computer file which may contain any type of data, encoded in Binary numeral system form for computer storage and processing purposes; for example, Document file format containing formatted text....
 data. Virtually all data can be parsed by a suitably equipped and programmed computer; reasons for choosing binary formats over text formats usually center on issues of storage space, as a binary representation usually takes up fewer byte
Byte

A byte is a basic unit of measurement of Computer storage in computer science. In many computer architectures it is a Byte addressing memory address space....
s of storage, and efficiency of input and output without parsing
Parsing

In computer science and linguistics, parsing, or, more formally, syntactic analysis, is the process of analyzing a sequence of lexical analysis#Token to determine their grammatical structure with respect to a given formal grammar....
 or conversion.

With the advent of standardized, highly structured markup languages, such as XML, and the decreasing costs of data storage, as well as faster and cheaper data communication networks, compromises between human-readability and machine-readability are now more common-place than they were in the past. In addition, these structured representations can be compressed
Data compression

In computer science and information theory, data compression or source coding is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than an code representation would use through use of specific encoding schemes....
 very effectively for transmission or storage.

See also

  • Machine-readable
    Machine-readable

    The term machine-readable refers to information encoded in a form which can be, scanned or sensed by a machine or computer and interpreted by its hardware and software....
     - data representation intended for automated equipment.