Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. A human-readable medium or human-readable format is a representation of data or information that can be naturally read by humans. In computing, human-readable data is often encoded as ASCII or Unicode text, rather than presented in a binary representation. Virtually all data can be parsed by a suitably equipped and programmed computer or machine; reasons for choosing binary formats over text formats usually center on issues of storage space, as a binary representation usually takes up fewer bytes of storage, and efficiency of access (input and output) without parsing or conversion.