A text file (sometimes spelled "textfile") is a kind of computer file that is structured as a sequence of lines. A computer file is a block of Arbitrary Information, or resource for storing information which is available to a Computer program and is usually In Computing, a line is a unit of organization for Text files. A text file exists within a computer file system. In Computing, a file system (often also written as filesystem) is a method for storing and organizing Computer files and the data they contain to make The end of a text file is often denoted by placing one or more special characters, known as an end-of-file marker, after the last line in a text file. In Computing, end-of-file, commonly abbreviated EOF, is a condition in a computer Operating system where no more data can be read from a data source
"Text file" refers to a type of container, while plain text refers to a type of content. In Computing, plain text is a term used for an ordinary "unformatted" sequential file readable as textual material without much processing Text files can contain plain text, but they are not limited to such.
At a generic level of description, there are two kinds of computer files: text files and binary files. [1]
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Data storage
Because of their simplicity text files are commonly used for storage of information. Computer data storage, often called storage or memory, refers to Computer components devices and recording media that retain digital They avoid some of the problems encountered with other file formats, such as endianness, padding bytes, or differences in the number of bytes in a machine word. In Computing, " word " is a term for the natural unit of data used by a particular computer design Further, when data corruption occurs in a text file, it is often easier to recover and continue processing the remaining contents. Data corruption refers to errors in Computer Data that occur during transmission or retrieval introducing unintended changes to the original data A disadvantage of text files is that they usually have a low entropy, meaning that the information occupies more storage than is strictly necessary.
Formats
ASCII
The ASCII standard allows ASCII-only text files (unlike most other file types) to be freely interchanged and readable on Unix, Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, DOS, and other systems. American Standard Code for Information Interchange ( ASCII) Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX, sometimes also written as Unix with Small caps) is a computer Macintosh, commonly nicknamed Mac is a Brand name which covers several lines of Personal computers designed developed and marketed by Apple Inc Microsoft Windows is a series of Software Operating systems and Graphical user interfaces produced by Microsoft. DOS, short for "Disk Operating System" is a shorthand term for several closely related Operating systems that dominated the IBM PC compatible market These differ in their preferred line ending convention and their interpretation of values outside the ASCII range (their character encoding). In Computing, a newline (also known as a line break or end-of-line / EOL character is a special character or sequence of characters A character encoding consists of a code that pairs a sequence of characters from a given character set (sometimes incorrectly referred to as Code page
MIME
Text files usually have the MIME type "text/plain", usually with additional information indicating an encoding. Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions ( MIME) is an Internet standard that extends the format of e-mail to support text in Character 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". Mac OS X (mæk oʊ ɛs tɛn is a line of computer Operating systems developed marketed and sold by Apple Inc, the latest of which is pre-loaded on all currently 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". A filename extension is a suffix to the name of a Computer file applied to indicate the encoding convention ( File format) of its contents 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.
. txt
. txt is a filename extension for files consisting of text usually contain very little formatting (ex: no bolding or italics). A filename extension is a suffix to the name of a Computer file applied to indicate the encoding convention ( File format) of its contents In Typography, emphasis is the exaggeration of words in a text with a font in a different style from the rest of the text&mdashto emphasise them In Typography, italic type /ɪˈtælɪk/ or /aɪˈtælɪk/ refers to cursive Typefaces based on a stylized form of calligraphic Handwriting. The precise definition of the . txt format is not specified, but typically matches the format accepted by the system terminal or simple text editor. A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that is used for entering data into and displaying data from a Computer or a Computing A text editor is a type of program used for editing plain Text files Text editors are often provided with Operating systems or software development Files with the . txt extension can easily be read or opened by any program that reads text and, for that reason, are considered universal (or platform independent). In computing cross-platform (also known as multi-platform) is a term used to refer to Computer software or computing methods and concepts that are implemented
The ASCII character set is the most common format for English-language text files, and is generally assumed to be the default file format in many situations. For accented and other non-ASCII characters, it is necessary to choose a character encoding. In many systems, this is chosen on the basis of the default locale setting on the computer it is read on. In Computing, locale is a set of Parameters that defines the user's language country and any special variant preferences that the user wants to see in their User Common character encodings include ISO 8859-1 for many European languages. ISO 8859-1, more formally cited as ISO/IEC 8859-1 is part 1 of ISO/IEC 8859, a standard Character encoding of the Latin alphabet.
Because many encodings have only a limited repertoire of characters, they are often only usable to represent text in a limited subset of human languages. Unicode is an attempt to create a common standard for representing all known languages, and most known character sets are subsets of the very large Unicode character set. In Computing, Unicode is an Industry standard allowing Computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's Although there are multiple character encodings available for Unicode, the most common is UTF-8, which has the advantage of being backwards-compatible with ASCII: that is, every ASCII text file is also a UTF-8 text file with identical meaning. UTF-8 (8- Bit UCS / Unicode Transformation Format) is a variable-length Character encoding for Unicode.
Standard Windows . txt files
Microsoft MS-DOS and Windows use a common text file format, with each line of text separated by a two character combination: CR and LF, which have ASCII codes 13 and 10. It is common for the last line of text not to be terminated with a CR-LF marker, and many text editors (including Notepad) do not automatically insert one on the last line.
Most Windows text files use a form of ANSI, OEM or Unicode encoding. What Windows terminology calls "ANSI encodings" are usually single-byte ISO-8859 encodings, except for in locales such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean that require double-byte character sets. ANSI encodings were traditionally used as default system locales within Windows, before the transition to Unicode. By contrast, OEM encodings, also known as MS-DOS code pages, were defined by IBM for use in the original IBM PC text mode display system. They typically include graphical and line-drawing characters common in full-screen MS-DOS applications. Newer Windows text files may use a Unicode encoding such as UTF-16LE or UTF-8.
Rendering
When opened by a text editor human-readable content is presented to the user. A text editor is a type of program used for editing plain Text files Text editors are often provided with Operating systems or software development This often consists of the file's plain text visible to the user. Depending on the application, control codes may be rendered either as literal instructions acted upon by the editor, or as visible escape characters that can be edited as plain text. In Computing and Telecommunication, an escape character is a single character which in a sequence of characters signifies that what is to follow takes an alternative Though there may be plain text in a text file, control characters within the file (especially the end-of-file character) can render the plain text unseen by a particular method. In Computing, end-of-file, commonly abbreviated EOF, is a condition in a computer Operating system where no more data can be read from a data source
Notes and references
- ^ Lewis, John (2006). Computer Science Illuminated. Jones and Bartlett. ISBN 0763741493.
See also
External links
List of file formats (alphabeticalThis is a list of File formats organized by type as can be found on Computers Filename extensions are usually noted in A filename extension is a suffix to the name of a Computer file applied to indicate the encoding convention ( File format) of its contents American Standard Code for Information Interchange ( ASCII) Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code ( EBCDIC) is an 8- Bit Character encoding ( Code page) used on IBM mainframe Operating A text editor is a type of program used for editing plain Text files Text editors are often provided with Operating systems or software development In Computing, Unicode is an Industry standard allowing Computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world'sDictionary
text file
-noun
- (computing) A simple data file containing only plain, human-readable, relatively unformatted text. A text file is distinct from a word processing file containing a formatted document, from other kinds of application-specific data files including spreadsheets and images, and from binary files containing raw, machine-readable data.
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