8/3/2019 Text File Advantages
1/2
Text file advantages:By Manas Das([email protected])1)Text
can easily be read or opened by any program that reads text and,
for that reason, areconsidered universal or platform
independent.
2)Because of their simplicity, text files are commonly used for
storage of information. They
avoid some of the problems encountered with other file formats
such as endianness, paddingbytes, or differences in the number of
bytes in a machine word.
3)The major advantage is it's possible to read the text file and
manipulate it using VBA,depending on how the data's arranged in the
file.4)It's also possible to treat the text file as a data table,
and use the standard approaches todealing with tables instead. This
has a major advantage in that anyone can use SQL to filter thetext
in the file.
4)When data corruption occurs in a text file, it is often easier
to recover and continue processingthe remaining contents.
5)A simple text file needs no additional metadata to assist the
reader in interpretation, andtherefore may contain no data at all,
which is a case of zero byte file.
6)The ASCII standard allows ASCII-only text files (unlike most
other file types) to be freelyinterchanged and readable on Unix,
Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, DOS, and other systems.
7)It typically matches the format accepted by the system
terminal or simple text editor.
8)Text files include small size and versatility. Kilobytes or
megabytes smaller than the samedata stored in other formats, they
can be rapidly and massively exchanged via email or disk.
9)Most programming code is stored in a text file prior to being
compiled that is, translated
into a machine-readable binary file. Files may also contain
machine-readable textual tags thatgive formatting information in
addition to plain text. For instance, a Hypertext Markup
Language(HTML) file can be opened as a plain text file in a text
editor, or display as a formatted webpage after being interpreted
by a web browser. Similar schemes include LaTeX, used for layingout
scientific papers, and Extensible Markup Language (XML), used for
structuring data.
10)Linux and other Unix-like operating systems attempt to use
plain text as much as possibleand to minimize the use of binary
code.It is used for system and application
configurationinformation. A major advantage of this approach is
ease of access and modification, which canbe particularly useful
when repairing a crashed or otherwise damaged system.
11)All filters use plain text input and produce plain text
output. Filters, which are among the
most important programs in Unix-like operating systems, are
small and (usually) specializedprograms that transform plain text
data in some meaningful way. They are designed to be linkedtogether
using pipes (represented in commands by the vertical bar character)
to form pipelinesof commands that can have great power and
flexibility.
12)Some operating systems, such as Solaris, the most popular
proprietary Unix-like operatingsystem, maintains a binary version
of certain system databases in addition to the plain textversion as
a means of optimizing system performance. The plain text version is
retained as ahuman interface to the binary version,i.e.,in order to
be able to easily read and modify it.
