What is text files

In this article I am going to explain about what is text files and it's format.
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Introduction

A text file is a computer file that stores a typed document as a series of alphanumeric characters, usually without visual formatting instruction using seven-bit ASCII characters.


Data storage

Text files are commonly used for storage of information. It avoid some of the problems like endianness, padding bytes, or differences in the number of bytes in a machine word, data corruption.


Formats

UTF-8

In this use English context text files can be uniquely ASCII, when in an international context text files are usually 8 bits permissive allowing storage of native texts.

ASCII

The ASCII standard allows ASCII-only text files.to be freely interchanged and readable on Unix, Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, DOS, and other systems.

MIME

Text files usually have the MIME type "text/plain", usually with additional information indicating an encoding. Prior to the advent of Mac OS X, the Mac OS system regarded the content of a file (the data fork) to be a text file when its resource fork indicated that the type of the file was "TEXT".

.TXT

.txt is a file format for files consisting of text usually containing very little formatting (e.g., no bolding or italics). The precise definition of the .txt format is not specified, but typically matches the format accepted by the system terminal or simple text editor. Files with the .txt extension can easily be read or opened by any program that reads text.

.TEXT

.text is an alternative file extension to .txt.


Disadvantage

disadvantage of text files is that they usually have a low entropy, meaning that the information occupies more storage than is strictly necessary.


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