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A text file (or plain text file) is a computer file which contains only ordinary textual characters with essentially no formatting. The term 'text file' is typically used in contrast with the term 'binary file', even though any file is fundamentally a sequence of arbitrary bits, and many computer components (for example, all hard disk circuitry and most system software) make no distinction between file types. However, a large percentage of application programs can understand and use text files in some way, but few programs can typically understand and use the contents of any particular binary file. Hence the distinction can be useful to computer users. Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... Computer files can be divided into two broad categories: binary and text. ... A computer file is a collection of information that is stored in a computer system and can be identified by its full path name. ... Computer files can be divided into two broad categories: binary and text. ... This article is about the unit of information. ... Typical hard drives of the mid-1990s. ... An operating system (OS) is a software program that manages the hardware and software resources of a computer. ... Application software is a loosely defined subclass of computer software that employs the capabilities of a computer directly to a task that the user wishes to perform. ...

Components

Text files are files where most bytes (or short sequences of bytes) represent ordinary readable characters such as letters, digits, and punctuation (including spaces), and include some control characters such as tabs, line feeds and carriage returns. This simplicity allows a wide variety of programs to display their contents. A byte is commonly used as a unit of storage measurement in computers, regardless of the type of data being stored. ... In computing, a control character or non-printing character, is a code point (a number) in a character set that does not in itself represent a written symbol. ... TAB is a Romanian amphibious armored personnel carrier. ... In computing, line feed (LF) is a control character indicating that one line should be fed out. ... Originally, carriage return was the term for the key, lever, or mechanism on a typewriter that would cause the cylinder on which the paper was held (the carriage) to return to the left side of the paper after a line of text had been typed, and would often move it...

Cryptography

The similar term plaintext is most commonly used in a cryptographic context and refers to unencrypted data. The similarity sometimes causes confusion, especially among those new to computers, cryptography, or data communications. The plain text term has a different meaning. ... The German Lorenz cipher machine, used in World War II for encryption of high-level messages. ...

Encoding

Generally, a text file contains characters in an ASCII-based encoding, or much less commonly an EBCDIC-based encoding, without any embedded information such as font information, hyperlinks or inline images. Text files are often encoded in an extension of ASCII; these include ISO 8859, EUC, a special encoding for Windows, a special Mac-Roman encoding for Mac OS, and Unicode encoding schemes (common on many platforms) such as UTF-8 or UTF-16. For other uses, see ASCII (disambiguation). ... EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code) is an 8-bit character encoding (code page) used on IBM mainframe operating systems, like z/OS, OS/390, VM and VSE, as well as IBM minicomputer operating systems like OS/400 and i5/OS. It is also employed on various non-IBM... A Specimen of typeset fonts and languages, by William Caslon, letter founder; from the 1728 Cyclopaedia. ... A hyperlink, or simply a link, is a reference in a hypertext document to another document or other resource. ... For images in Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Images. ... ISO 8859, more formally ISO/IEC 8859, is a joint ISO and IEC standard for 8-bit character encodings for use by computers. ... Extended Unix Coding (EUC) is an 8-bit character encoding used primarily for Japanese and Korean. ... Code page is the traditional IBM term used for a specific character encoding table: a mapping in which a sequence of bits, usually a single octet representing integer values 0 through 255, is associated with a specific character. ... Microsoft Windows is a family of operating systems by Microsoft for use on personal computers, although versions of Windows designed for servers, embedded devices, and other platforms also exist. ... The Mac OS Roman character set Mac-Roman encoding is a one byte character encoding system, traditionally used by Mac OS. In Mac OS X, it has been replaced with Unicode. ... Mac OS, which stands for Macintosh Operating System, is a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Computer for their Macintosh line of computer systems. ... Due to technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ... UTF-8 (8-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode created by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike. ... In computing, UTF-16 is a 16-bit Unicode Transformation Format, a character encoding form that provides a way to represent a series of abstract characters from Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 as a series of 16-bit words suitable for storage or transmission via data networks. ...

Software Use

Although text files are often meant for humans to read, they are also commonly used for data storage by computer programs. Text files have some advantages even for data storage because they avoid certain problems with binary files, such as endianness, padding bytes, or differences in the number of bytes in a machine word. Further, when data corruption occurs in a file used for data storage, it is far easier for a human to fix if it is a text file. As a bonus, it may be easier for the program to recover from the error, because text files are pretty verbose, while binary files are usually compact (it's said that text files have a low entropy rate). Damaging an amount of a text file destroys little information; damaging the same amount of a binary file destroys more information. Endianness generally refers to sequencing methods used in a one-dimensional system (such as writing or computer memory). ... In computing, word is a term for the natural unit of data used by a particular computer design. ... Data corruption refers to computer data that when transmitted, arrives at its destination as different than when it was transmitted from the source. ... Entropy of a Bernoulli trial as a function of success probability. ...

Formats

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". Under the Windows operating system, a file is regarded as a text file if the suffix of the name of the file (the "extension") is "txt". However, many other suffixes are used for text files with specific purposes. For example, source code for computer programs is usually kept in text files that have file name suffixes indicating the programming language in which the source is written. Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) is an Internet Standard for the format of e-mail. ... Mac OS X is a proprietary operating system developed and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. ... A filename extension is an extra set of (usually) alphanumeric characters that is appended to the end of a filename to allow computer users (as well as various pieces of software on the computer system) to quickly determine the type of data stored in the file. ... . ...

ASCII

The ASCII standard allows ASCII-only plain text files (unlike most other file types) to be freely interchanged and readable on Unix, Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, DOS, and other systems. These differ in their preferred line ending convention (see new line) and their interpretation of values outside the ASCII range (their character encoding). Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ... The first Macintosh computer, introduced in 1984, upgraded to a 512K Fat Mac. ... Microsoft Windows is a family of operating systems by Microsoft for use on personal computers, although versions of Windows designed for servers, embedded devices, and other platforms also exist. ... The acronym DOS stands for disk operating system, an operating system component for computers that provides the abstraction of a file system resident on hard disk or floppy disk secondary storage. ... In computing, a newline is a special character or sequence of characters signifying the end of a line of text. ... A character encoding consists of a code that pairs a sequence of characters from a given set with something else, such as a sequence of natural numbers, octets or electrical pulses, in order to facilitate the storage of text in computers and the transmission of text through telecommunication networks. ...

Other Formats

Plain text is often used as a readable representation of other data that is not itself purely textual: for example, a formatted webpage is not plain text, but its HTML source is. Similarly, source code for computer programs is usually stored in text files, but is compiled into a binary form for execution. A webpage or web page is a page of the World Wide Web, usually in HTML/XHTML format (the file extensions are typically htm or html) and with hypertext links to enable navigation from one page or section to another. ... An excerpt of HTML code with syntax highlighting In computing, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language designed for the creation of web pages with hypertext and other information to be displayed in a web browser. ... Source code (commonly just source or code) is any series of statements written in some human-readable computer programming language. ... A diagram of the operation of a typical multi-language compiler. ...

See also

• Plain text
• Binary file

Computer files can be divided into two broad categories: binary and text. ... Computer files can be divided into two broad categories: binary and text. ...

External links

• Text File Types
• C2: the Power of Plain Text