Binary files, text files

From Helpful
(Redirected from Binary data)
Jump to navigation Jump to search
The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.

What do these terms even mean?

Pragmatically,

  • text file = "All data is useful as text"
characters in a sequence that you could edit at will in the simplest types of "characters after another" style editor
human-interpretable, human-editable
  • binary file = "not just text". It's a catch-all.
a binary file is one you probably can't edit without severely breaking the present structure
and where it probably wouldn't occur to you, e.g. because the most useful data isn't text to start with.
probably not human-readable, probably not human-editable


Even that needs footnotes, and we haven't even gotten technical yet.


'Binary' seems to come from a time before a lot of different file formats existed, where computer use was computer programming, and where we mostly had code that humans wrote, and code in compiled, machine-readable form.

The compiler output was ofetn called 'the binary', and that is still used. So arguably it's short for 'a binary executable' or some such term.







Plain text file

There is arguably no such thing as a plain text file

That is, it turns out there are a number of ways to encode special characters, that are hard to distinguisable except for guessing hard.

...exactly because in a just-characters file, we chose not to store what encoding is being used.


Depending on the encoding, there may be values you don't expect in another type of text file. You need to know more about the data that's in there to read it correctly.