I came across the program Eqonomize , which advertises itself as personal accounting software. As it stores its data in XML format, would that be considered plain text or something else? Just curious about what would be considered plain text. I don't know any experience using the software. Thank you. …

Most people would say it's "somewhat" - not as plain as our most human-readable plain text formats, but plainer than a sqlite database for example. GnuCash is another app which uses it (actually gives a choice of these). Nice link. So many accounting apps! This one looks like a Windows and Linux-fr…

Well in fact XML is plain text not a binary language. However, I would say it is language focused to exchange data between machines. Because it is quite verbose and easy to parse by programs. More lightweight plain text languages such as Yaml or even JSON are more human readable and editable, and to…

Yeah, I'd say XML is plain text. It's just plain text with context text to give the content meaning. …But it's still just plain text

It is not plain text in the context of Plain-Text Accounting applications. The idea behind PTA is that you enter your transactions using a text editor. While technically "plain text" in terms of character set, XML is a structured machine-readable file. It would be plain text without the XML tags. …

Hi @cicko , welcome to the community :slightly_smiling_face: I agree XML is tedious; but it doesn't remove the fact that it's plain text. We enter journal transactions manually; but when we have to deal with large volumes, we leverage things like hledger import and ledger convert to automate the en…

Hi. I would say XML is PTA, but probably too verbose for my taste. I edit HTML by hand. XHTML is XML, more tedious than just HTML, but I still have done it by hand (usually using templates) and have even edited a bit of XML by hand, so I would say XML could be considered PTA, even if the concept in…

X in XML stands for "extensible", so "data in XML format" means almost nothing by itself, as it could be anywhere in a gamut from <transaction> 2025-01-01 Happy new year income:bonus assets:cash $1000 </transaction> to some sort of <transaction> <date><year>2025</year><month>01</month><day>…

Oh, if the app isn't designed for directly edited files, the app isn't PTA, even if I would say the format is. (I would not call transformed data PTA, only human-readable data.) Binary can be directly edited, too, but that isn't usually intended. The reason I moved to PTA is actually that I found m…

XML is "plain text" as much as CSV is "plain text". Many financial institutions will download transaction data in QFX format which (at least since version 2) is XML.

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Would XML data be considered plain text?

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