Which statement about plaintext logs is an advantage related to compression?

• A. Good text compression ratios
• B. They never compress well
• C. They require binary parsers
• D. They are unreadable when compressed

Answer: (A)

Plaintext logs often have a lot of repetition and a predictable structure—timestamps, levels like INFO or ERROR, and common message fragments appear across many lines. General text compression algorithms work by spotting these repeated sequences and replacing them with shorter codes, often using dictionaries and entropy coding. Because the data is highly repetitive and textual, you can achieve strong compression ratios, reducing storage needs and speeding up transmission while still allowing exact recovery when you decompress. The content remains readable once decompressed, which is a key benefit of lossless compression. The other statements don’t fit: plaintext doesn’t require binary parsers to be compressed, and the compressed form isn’t unreadable—decompressing returns the original readable log text.