Can any file and its data be converted to a String or plaintext?
Can any file and its data be converted to a String or plaintext?
I've noticed some files I opened in a text editor have all kinds of crazy unrenderable chars
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technically, yes. all unprintable binary can be resolved to 64 printable characters. but that resulting string may not be english or any human language.
But its still contains the actual data in a faithfully reproducible/useable way?
Yes. Decoding a base64 encoded string will give you back the exact original data.
Importantly though, this isn't what you're seeing when you open files in a text editor as you describe in your original post, and if you copied the text of those files and saved a new copy it's very likely that it would not reproduce correctly.
yes, this method doesn't lose any bits. one of its primary use before was email which was strictly text only.