File:Text-txt.svg · Wikimedia Commons · See Wikimedia Commons
text file
Sign in to saveAlso known as .txt, plain text, plain text file, textfile, TXT file, plain text document, Text file format, Text/plain
kind of computer file containing plain text
Key facts
- Filename extension
- .txt
- Internet media type
- text/plain
- Type code
- TEXT
- Uniform type identifier uti
- public.plain-text
- Uti conformation
- public.text
- Magic number
- None
- Type of format
- Document file format , Generic container format
- Free format
- yes
via Wikipedia infobox
~9 min read
Encyclopedic overview
A text file (sometimes spelled textfile; an old alternative name is flat file) is a kind of computer file that is structured as a sequence of lines of electronic text. A text file exists stored as data within a computer file system.
In operating systems such as CP/M, 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 end-of-file (EOF) marker, as padding after the last line in a text file. In modern operating systems such as DOS, 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.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “text file” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.