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Text file with portion of The Human Side of Animals by Royal Dixon, displayed by the command cat in an xterm window. In computing, plain text is a loose term for data (e.g. file contents) that represent only characters of readable material but not its graphical representation nor other objects (floating-point numbers, images, etc.).
With the advent of computing, the term plaintext expanded beyond human-readable documents to mean any data, including binary files, in a form that can be viewed or used without requiring a key or other decryption device. Information—a message, document, file, etc.—if to be communicated or stored in an unencrypted form is referred to as ...
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 ...
A flat-file database is a database stored in a file called a flat file. Records follow a uniform format, and there are no structures for indexing or recognizing relationships between records. The file is simple. A flat file can be a plain text file (e.g. csv, txt or tsv), or a binary file. Relationships can be inferred from the data in the ...
A text file can contain any stream of characters, including possible control characters, and is encoded in one of various character encoding schemes. Some file formats, such as HTML, scalable vector graphics, and the source code of computer software are text files with defined syntaxes that allow them to be used for specific purposes.
For example, the bytes of a plain text file (.txt in Windows) are associated with either ASCII or UTF-8 characters, while the bytes of image, video, and audio files are interpreted otherwise. Most file types also allocate a few bytes for metadata, which allows a file to carry some basic information about itself.
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Plain text is stored in text files, although text files do not exclusively store plain text. Since the early days of computers, plain text was (once by necessity and now by convention) generally displayed using a monospace font, such that horizontal alignment and columnar formatting were sometimes done using whitespace characters.