Text Files extension

Text file is a kind of computer file that is structured as a sequence of lines. Text files can contain plain text information in ASCII format.

ASCII refers to American Standard Code for Information Interchange, a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. Because of the simplicity of text files, they are commonly used to save 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. Text files contain textual data and may be saved in plain text or rich text formats. While most text files are documents created and saved by users, they can also be used by software developers to store program data. Examples of text files include word processing documents, log files, and saved email messages.