PGP Encryption file or text?

Question

I have a csv file that required to be encrypted. I want to ask that is there any difference between encrypt the content and encrypt the file? Or they are the same? Because our client doesn't clearly specify what they want?

Thanks,

Answer 1

Usually when they say PGP encryption, they are talking about commercial programs that encrypt a file or files into one gpg file with their public, which they can decrypt with their private key.
The other way is encrypt it yourself line-by-line in code (there are libraries that do that using file streams; very easy).
Your client one way or another has to tell you how that expect to decrypt the data later on, which will tell you how you encrypt in the first place.

Answer 2

Encryption will always produce binary result, which can be "armored" (base64-encoded and wrapped) then in order to get the text. All implementations conformant to OpenPGP standard handle armored data by decoding it to binary automatically, so it doesn't really matter what mode you specify. One special case is when you plan to paste the result to some other text data (such as text document), then armoring is mandatory.