Why should I use a human readable file format?

Question

Why should I use a human readable file format in preference to a binary one? Is there ever a situation when this isn\'t the case?

EDIT: I did have this as an explana

Answer 1

Human readable is not equal to easier to be parsed by machine code.

Take human natural language as an example. :) Machine parsing of human language is still a pending problem to be fully solved.

So I agree with https://stackoverflow.com/a/714111/2727173 which has much deeper insight on this question.

Answer 2

Version control is easier with text formats, because changes can easily be viewed and merged.

Especially MS-Word is giving us grief in this respect.

Answer 3

When reading Fielding's dissertation about REST, I really liked the concept of "Architectural Properties"; one that sticked was "Visibility". That's what we're talking about here: being able to 'see' the data. Huge benefits when debugging the system.

One aspect that I find missing in the other answers: enforcing semantics.

From the moment you go for human readable, you allow the silly notepad user to create data to be fed into the system. No way to guarantee this data makes sense. No way to guarantee the system will respond in a sensible way.

So in the case you don't need to notepad-inspect your data, and you want to enforce valid data (by e.g. usage of an API) rather than first validating it, you better avoid human readable data. If debuggeability is an issue (it most often is), inspection of the data can be done by using the API, too.

Answer 4

A major reason is that if someone needs to read the data say, 30 years from now, human readable format can be figured out. Binary is much more difficult.

If your have large data sets that are binary by nature (e.g. images), they obviously can't be stored in any other than binary form. But even then, the metadata could (and should!) be human-readable.

Answer 5

The human format is simplier to parsing and debugging if you have a problem with a field (example: a field contains a number where the spec says the this field must be a string), also the human format is closier to domain of problem.

I prefer the binary format with a lot of data AND i'm sure that I have the software for parsing him :)

Answer 6

Because you are a human, and sooner or later you (or one of your customers) will be able to read the data.

We only use binary format if speed is an issue. And even then debugging is troublesome so we added a human readable equivalent.