Textual file

In Data-processing, a textual file or rough textual file or simple textual file or (generally wrongly) ASCII file , is a file whose contents represent only one continuation of data-processing characters. It should be noted that in data processing, the space and the return to the line are regarded as characters as well as a letter, a Chiffre or a sign of Ponctuation.

A file “not text” is called “binary Fichier”, in the direction where the bits contained in the file cannot be represented not a simple succession of characters.

The denomination ASCII file is often wrongly used in connection with textual files not using the Codage of characters ASCII.

Use

The textual files are used by many Logiciel S to preserve the data of configuration. They are also used to contain the texts written in Computer programming languages. Moreover, the majority of the computer programming languages offer function S preset to handle rough text, which makes the management of the textual files particularly accessible.

The software used to publish a textual file is a text editor. In the general case, a Word processing does not produce textual files. Indeed, a word processing does not need only to handle rough text, but also information on the Fonte of character used, the provision of the characters in pages, the styles typographical, etc However, the word processing can open or safeguard a textual file, no information of working being preserved, except if necessary the jumps of line.

Structure

A textual file can simply contain text in any Langue. In this case it does not respect any particular structure.

It was once commercial of liver who sold liver in the Town of Foix. She says “my faith it is the first time that I sell liver in the town of Foix!” you speak english?

Often a textual file contains in fact a structured data which can be analyzed by a software and posted in more evolved/moved form, for example a Web page: 


 
 
  Page Web of exemple
  
   
Ceci is a Web page of exemple.

Lastly, and in a more anecdotic way, the matter of a textual file can be diverted to contain an image, it is what is called the ASCII Art: 


    __@   
   _ `\ <, _ 
  (*)/(*)
 ~~~~~~~~~~

Coding of the characters

Like all files data processing, a textual file contains bytes basically (and thus bits). The characteristic of a textual file is that the whole of the file respects a Codage of characters standard.

There exist many standards of coding of characters, which can make problematic the compatibility of the textual files. In the Years 1960, there existed almost a character set per type of computer. Today the ISO 646 (often called ASCII) is limited subset common to these many codings. One can however still meet the character set EBCDIC of the Mainframe S IBM, UTF-16 or of the character sets specific to certain countries.

The standards ASCII and ISO 646 cover only the characters necessary to write in English. For the other languages, different and incompatible standards are used for the accentuated characters and the nonLatin alphabets used by the other languages. The standard Unicode was conceived to cover the whole of the existing characters in the world and to avoid the problems of incompatibility involved in the use of different codings. It is essential gradually but slowly.

Moreover the ASCII is not universal, thus, in ASCII, all as in the Iso-8859-15, the character 0x85 represents a new line, whereas in Windows-1252, it represents 3 points of suspension.

The files in UTF-8 have the effect of being compatible with the ASCII, while offering the new possibilities of Unicode.

See too

Internal bonds

References

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