Text file

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Text file Text-txt.svg
Filename extension
.txt
Internet media type
text/plain
Type code
TEXT
Uniform Type Identifier (UTI) public.plain-text
UTI conformation
public.text
Type of format Document file format, Generic container format
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. Such markers were required u
nder the CP/M and MS-DOS operating systems. On modern operating systems such as
Windows or Linux, text files do not contain any special EOF 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
1 Data storage
2 Encoding
3 Formats
3.1 Windows text files
3.2 Unix text files
3.3 Apple Macintosh text files
4 Rendering
5 See also
6 Notes and references
7 External links
Data storage
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
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