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A common type of icon used to represent text files in a file explorer.

A text file (sometimes spelled "textfile": an old alternative name is "flatfile"
) is a kind of computer file that is structured as a sequence of lines of electr
onic text. A text file exists within a computer file system. The end of a text f
ile is often denoted by placing one or more special characters, known as an endof-file marker, after the last line in a text file. However, on some popular ope
rating systems such as Windows or Linux, text files do not contain any special E
OF character.
"Text file" refers to a type of container, while plain text refers to a type of
content. 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 f
iles and binary files.[1]

Contents [hide]
1 Data storage
2 Encoding
3 Formats 3.1 Windows text files
3.2 Unix text files
3.3 Apple Macintosh text files
4
5
6
7

Rendering
See also
Notes and references
External links

Data storage[edit]

A stylized iconic depiction of a CSV-formatted text file.

Because of their simplicity, text files are commonly used for storage of informa

tion. 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. Further, when data corruption occurs in a text file, it is often easier t
o recover and continue processing the remaining contents. A disadvantage of text
files is that they usually have a low entropy, meaning that the information occ
upies more storage than is strictly necessary.
A simple text file needs no additional metadata to assist the reader in interpre
tation, and therefore may contain no data at all, which is a case of zero byte f
ile.
Encoding[edit]
The ASCII character set is the most common format for English-language text file
s, and is generally assumed to be the default file format in many situations. Fo
r 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 se
tting on the computer it is read on. Common character encodings include ISO 8859
-1 for many European languages.
Because many encodings have only a limited repertoire of characters, they are of
ten only usable to represent text in a limited subset of human languages. Unicod
e 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. 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.
Formats[edit]
On most operating systems the name text file refers to file format that allows o
nly plain text content with very little formatting (e.g., no bold or italic type
s). Such files can be viewed and edited on text terminals or in simple text edit
ors. Text files usually have the MIME type "text/plain", usually with additional
information indicating an encoding.
Windows text files[edit]
MS-DOS and Windows use a common text file format, with each line of text separat
ed by a two-character combination: carriage return (CR) and line feed (LF). It i
s 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 la
st line.
On Microsoft Windows operating systems, a file is regarded as a text file if the
suffix of the name of the file (the "filename extension") is "txt". However, ma
ny other suffixes are used for text files with specific purposes. For example, s
ource code for computer programs is usually kept in text files that have file na
me suffixes indicating the programming language in which the source is written.
Most Windows text files use "ANSI", "OEM", "Unicode" or "UTF-8" encoding. What W
indows terminology calls "ANSI encodings" are usually single-byte ISO-8859 encod
ings (i.e. ANSI in the Microsoft Notepad menus is really "System Code Page", non
-Unicode, legacy encoding), except for in locales such as Chinese, Japanese and
Korean that require double-byte character sets. ANSI encodings were traditionall
y used as default system locales within Windows, before the transition to Unicod
e. 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 incl
ude graphical and line-drawing characters common in (possibly full-screen) MS-DO

S applications. "Unicode"-encoded Windows text files contain text in UTF-16 Unic

ode Transformation Format. Such files normally begin with Byte Order Mark, which
communicates the endianness of the file content. Although UTF-8 does not suffer
from endianness problems, many Windows programs (i.e. Notepad) prepend the cont
ents of UTF-8-encoded files with Byte Order Mark,[2] to differentiate UTF-8 enco
ding from other 8-bit encodings.[citation needed]
Unix text files[edit]
On Unix-like operating systems text files format is precisely described: POSIX d
efines a text file as a file that contains characters organized into zero or mor
e lines,[3] where lines are sequences of zero or more non-newline characters plu
s a terminating newline character,[4] normally LF.
Additionally, POSIX defines a printable file as a text file whose characters are
printable or space or backspace according to regional rules. This excludes cont
rol characters, which are not printable.[5]
Apple Macintosh text files[edit]
Prior to the advent of Mac OS X, the Mac OS system regarded the content of a fil
e (the data fork) to be a text file when its resource fork indicated that the ty
pe of the file was "TEXT". Lines of Macintosh text files are terminated with CR
characters.
Being certified Unix, Mac OS X uses POSIX format for text files.
Rendering[edit]
When opened by a text editor, human-readable content is presented to the user. T
his often consists of the file's plain text visible to the user. Depending on th
e application, control codes may be rendered either as literal instructions acte
d upon by the editor, or as visible escape characters that can be edited as plai
n text. 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 unsee
n by a particular method.
See also[edit]
List of file formats
File extensions
ASCII
EBCDIC
Newline
Text editor
Unicode
Notes and references[edit]
1.Jump up ^ Lewis, John (2006). Computer Science Illuminated. Jones and Bartlett
. ISBN 0-7637-4149-3.
2.Jump up ^ "Using Byte Order Marks". Internationalization for Windows Applicati
ons. Microsoft. Retrieved 2015-12-15.
3.Jump up ^ "3.397 Text File". IEEE Std 1003.1, 2013 Edition. IEEE Computer Soci
ety. Retrieved 2015-12-15.
4.Jump up ^ "3.206 Line". IEEE Std 1003.1, 2013 Edition. IEEE Computer Society.
Retrieved 2015-12-15.
5.Jump up ^ "3.284 Printable File". IEEE Std 1003.1, 2013 Edition. IEEE Computer
Society. Retrieved 2015-12-15.
External links[edit]

C2: the Power of Plain Text

Categories: Text file formats
Computer data