Plaintext is the lazy way out. It's not even remotely a standard because everyone does it differently. It's the shortest path from thinking "I need to persist

Plaintext is the lazy way out. It's not even remotely a standard because everyone does it differently. It's the shortest path from thinking "I need to persist this crap" to getting something working. Write the bytes to a file, sprinkle some separators, read and parse it back.