A text file is a type of computer file that saves plain text information. It doesn’t have any images, bold, italics, or other formatting choices built in. Text files makes up of only letters, numbers, and special characters. Simple text editors can be used to read and change the information of these files.
Text files are easy to use because they don’t have all the features needed for complex formatting. This makes them very flexible and compatible with many systems and programs. Many software programs can easily read and write them without the need for specialised processing or formatting. This makes them useful for writing and maintaining code, configuration instructions, and documentation.
Different Types of Text Files
Here are some of the several types of text files.
1. Text file
This type of writing doesn’t have any special formatting, like italics, bold, headings, subheadings, etc. Notepad is how you make a simple text file in Microsoft OS. When written in Microsoft OS, these files end in.txt.
2. File With Comma Separated
The ending of this file stays.csv Information in this file is kept in table form. Every line records something; commas separate the fields in every entry.
3. HTML code
HTML files uses create computer software and webpages. The HTML tag preserved this. Hyper Text Markup Language holds all of the text in this file.
4. Doc and docx files
This kind of file creates on Microsoft OS by MS Word. Text can be kept in this kind of file in the proper manner. One can add a header and a bottom. As you write, you can employ bold, italic, and other styles.
5. Create in Markdown
This kind of file has the text written using markdown language. Good documentation creates from this kind of file. This file has the name.md.
6. Code language source code
Code in computer languages such Python, JavaScript, C, and more can also be written in text files. This file can be kept with several extensions depending on the computer language: Python (.py), JavaScript (.js, and so on.
Opening a Text File: How can I do it?
Your OS will define how you open a text file. One can open a file devoid of text by design as a text file. All you have to do while on Windows is right-click the text file icon to select “Open as text file.”
If you want to start a text file on Mac OS X, right-click on the icon and choose “text editor.” With these ways, you can open any file that looks like a text file, even ones that don’t contain text.
Changing a text file
“Convert” a text file means to change the way it stores. There are a lot of reasons to change a text file. You can save a text file in a certain style right in the text editor. You can save a text file in many formats, such as HTML, XML, YML, CSV, and more.
How do I change Text Files?
There are many reasons to change text files into other types of files, such as XLSX, XML, HTML, CSV, PDF, and more. However, the major reason is to save the text files in a different type of file. That’s possible with most advanced text editors, but not with simpler ones because they only support basic export forms like RTF, CSV, and TXT.
One tool, Notepad++, can store a lot of different file types, including KML, HEX, VHD, AU3, SH, BAT, HTML, TXT, NFO, TEX, PLIST, REG, URL, JAVA, XML, PHP, PS, ASM, SQL, CSS, CMD, and VGS.
It’s likely that other apps that can change a file to a text format can save with different extensions, like XML, TXT, CSV, and RTF. So, if you want to change the name of a file from one program to TXT format, you have to go back to the program that made the text file in the first place.