as an end-of-file (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
record-orientated file systems may not
use new line delimiters and will primarily
store text files with lines separated as
fixed or variable length records.
 Text file

Filename extension .txt

Internet media type text/plain
Type code TEXT
Uniform Type public.plain-text
Identifier (UTI)
UTI conformation public.text
Type of format Document file
format, Generic
container format

"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
binary files.[1]

Data storage

A stylized iconic depiction of a

CSV-formatted text file.

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 zero-byte
file.

Encoding
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. It covers
American English, but for the British
pound sign, the euro sign, or characters
used outside English, a richer character
set must be used. In many systems, this
is chosen based on the default locale
setting on the computer it is read on.
Prior to UTF-8, this was traditionally
single-byte encodings (such as ISO-8859-
1 through ISO-8859-16) for European
languages and wide character encodings
for Asian languages.

Because encodings necessarily have

only a limited repertoire of characters,
often very small, many are 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.
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 also has
the advantage that it is easily auto-
detectable. Thus, a common operating
mode of UTF-8 capable software, when
opening files of unknown encoding, is to
try UTF-8 first and fall back to a locale
dependent legacy encoding when it
definitely isn't UTF-8.

Formats
On most operating systems, the name
text file refers to a file format that allows
only plain text content with very little
formatting (e.g., no bold or italic types).
Such files can be viewed and edited on
text terminals or in simple text editors.
Text files usually have the MIME type
text/plain , usually with additional
information indicating an encoding.
Microsoft Windows text files

MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows use a

common text file format, with each line
of text separated by a two-character
combination: carriage return (CR) and
line feed (LF). 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.

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, 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.

Most Microsoft Windows text files use

ANSI, OEM, Unicode or UTF-8 encoding.
What Microsoft Windows terminology
calls "ANSI encodings" are usually single-
byte ISO/IEC 8859 encodings (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 traditionally used
as default system locales within
Microsoft Windows, before the transition
to Unicode. By contrast, OEM encodings,
also known as 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 DOS
applications. "Unicode"-encoded
Microsoft Windows text files contain text
in UTF-16 Unicode Transformation
Format. Such files normally begin with
byte order mark (BOM), which
communicates the endianness of the file
content. Although UTF-8 does not suffer
from endianness problems, many
Microsoft Windows programs (i.e.
Notepad) prepend the contents of UTF-8-
encoded files with BOM,[2] to differentiate
UTF-8 encoding from other 8-bit
encodings.[3]

Unix text files

On Unix-like operating systems, text files

format is precisely described: POSIX
defines a text file as a file that contains
characters organized into zero or more
lines,[4] where lines are sequences of
zero or more non-newline characters plus
a terminating newline character,[5]
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 most control characters, which
are not printable.[6]

Apple Macintosh text files

Prior to the advent of macOS, the classic

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".[7] Lines of classic
Mac OS text files are terminated with CR
characters.[8]
Being a Unix-like system, macOS uses
Unix format for text files.[8] Uniform Type
Identifier (UTI) used for text files in
macOS is "public.plain-text"; additional,
more specific UTIs are: "public.utf8-plain-
text" for utf-8-encoded text, "public.utf16-
external-plain-text" and "public.utf16-
plain-text" for utf-16-encoded text and
"com.apple.traditional-mac-plain-text" for
classic Mac OS text files.[7]

Rendering
When opened by a text editor, human-
readable content is presented to the user.
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. 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.

See also
ASCII
EBCDIC
Filename extension
List of file formats
Newline
Syntax highlighting
 Text editor
Unicode

Notes and references

1. Lewis, John (2006). Computer Science
Illuminated (https://archive.org/details/co
mputersciencei00nell) . Jones and
Bartlett. ISBN 0-7637-4149-3.
2. "Using Byte Order Marks" (https://docs.mi
crosoft.com/en-gb/windows/win32/intl/u
sing-byte-order-marks) .
Internationalization for Windows
Applications. Microsoft. Jan 7, 2021.
Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20
230221224807/https://learn.microsoft.co
m/en-gb/windows/win32/intl/using-byte-
order-marks) from the original on Feb 21,
2023. Retrieved 2022-04-21.
3. Freytag, Asmus (2015-12-18). "FAQ –
UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32 & BOM" (https://w
ww.unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html#BO
M) . The Unicode Consortium. Retrieved
2016-05-30. "Yes, UTF-8 can contain a
BOM. However, it makes no difference as
to the endianness of the byte stream.
UTF-8 always has the same byte order. An
initial BOM is only used as a signature —
an indication that an otherwise unmarked
text file is in UTF-8. Note that some
recipients of UTF-8 encoded data do not
expect a BOM. Where UTF-8 is used
transparently in 8-bit environments, the
use of a BOM will interfere with any
protocol or file format that expects
specific ASCII characters at the beginning,
such as the use of "#!" of at the beginning
of Unix shell scripts."
4. "3.403 Text File" (http://pubs.opengroup.o
rg/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1
_chap03.html#tag_03_403) . IEEE Std
1003.1, 2017 Edition. IEEE Computer
Society. Retrieved 2019-03-01.
5. "3.206 Line" (http://pubs.opengroup.org/o
nlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_cha
p03.html#tag_03_206) . IEEE Std 1003.1,
2013 Edition. IEEE Computer Society.
Retrieved 2015-12-15.
6. "3.284 Printable File" (http://pubs.opengro
up.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedef
s/V1_chap03.html#tag_03_284) . IEEE
Std 1003.1, 2013 Edition. IEEE Computer
Society. Retrieved 2015-12-15.
7. "System-Declared Uniform Type
Identifiers" (https://developer.apple.com/li
brary/prerelease/content/documentation/
 Miscellaneous/Reference/UTIRef/Article
s/System-DeclaredUniformTypeIdentifier
s.html) . Guides and Sample Code. Apple
Inc. 2009-11-17. Retrieved 2016-09-12.
8. "Designing Scripts for Cross-Platform
Deployment" (https://developer.apple.co
m/library/mac/documentation/OpenSour
ce/Conceptual/ShellScripting/PortingScri
ptstoMacOSX/PortingScriptstoMacOSX.h
tml) . Mac Developer Library. Apple Inc.
2014-03-10. Retrieved 2016-09-12.

External links
Power of Plain Text on C2 wiki

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title=Text_file&oldid=1140818412"
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