Chapter 7 Text files

There are generally two kinds of computer files:

1. Text files: Files that are structured as a sequence of lines of electronic text. They are readable without much processing.

2. Binary files: All files that are not text files. They thus require knowledge about their structure to be readable.

Text files are omnipresent because they are human readable and do not require meta data for processing. However, text files do not allow for formatting, and often use more space than clever binary files.