Plain Text file

Type of format	Data file, Document file format, Generic container format
First released	Before 1989
Developer	Unknown
Filename extension	.txt
Open Format?	Yes
Free Format?	Yes
Magic Number	None

Text files (also known as Plain text) consist of characters encoded sequentially in a particular character encoding (commonly Unicode-8 and ASCII). Plain text files contain no formatting information other than white space characters.

In BD-J, text files are used as assets for Java programming, the files usually contain text character data, mathematical positions (X-Y coordinates) for graphics, and other data. Almost all BD-J applications often use .txt files.

Encoding

The ASCII character set is the most common compatible character set for English-language text files, and is generally assumed to be the default file format in many situations. 

 !     "     #     $     %     &     '     (     )     *     +     ,     -     .     /  

0     1     2     3     4     5     6     7     8     9     :     ;     <     =     >     ?  @     

A     B     C     D     E     F     G     H     I     J     K     L     M     N     O  

P     Q     R     S     T     U     V     W     X     Y     Z     [     \     ]     ^     _  `    

 a     b     c     d     e     f     g     h     i     j   k     l     m     n     o    p     q    

 r     s     t     u     v     w     x     y     z     {     |     }     ~

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 like Unicode UTF-8. Most BD-J titles use Unicode UTF-8, a modern and common character set which was designed for backward compatibility with ASCII.

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 (BIG5, ShiftJS).

Links and References

• Text file (Wikipedia)
• Text file (Archive Team)
• textfiles.com: a site full of old text files
• Less: a Unix/Linux text file pager (for viewing files)
• Scenario for discussion: Text files.
• Always bet on text

Author(s) : Æ Firestone