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Concept
Text file
Summary
A text file (sometimes spelled textfile; an old alternative name is flatfile) is a kind of that is structured as a sequence of of electronic text. A text file exists stored as data within a . In operating systems such as CP/M and MS-DOS, where the operating system does not keep track of the file size in bytes, the end of a text file is denoted by placing one or more special characters, known as an (EOF) marker, as padding after the last line in a text file. On modern operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and Unix-like systems, text files do not contain any special EOF character, because file systems on those operating systems keep track of the file size in bytes. Most text files need to have end-of-line delimiters, which are done in a few different ways depending on operating system. Some operating systems with may not use new line delimiters and will primarily store text files with lines separated as fixed or variable length records.
"Text file" refers to a type of container, while plain text refers to a type of content.
At a generic level of description, there are two kinds of computer files: text files and s.
Because of their simplicity, text files are commonly used for storage of information. 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 to recover and continue processing the remaining contents. A disadvantage of text files is that they usually have a low entropy, meaning that the information occupies more storage than is strictly necessary.
A simple text file may need no additional metadata (other than knowledge of its character set) to assist the reader in interpretation. A text file may contain no data at all, which is a case of .
The ASCII character set is the most common compatible subset of character sets for English-language text files, and is generally assumed to be the default file format in many situations.
Official source
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