TXT Format Guide

Available Conversions

About TXT Format

TXT (plain text file) is the most fundamental and universal text file format that contains only readable characters without any formatting, images, or special styles. Plain text files use character encoding schemes like ASCII, UTF-8, or UTF-16 to represent letters, numbers, and basic symbols. TXT files are the simplest form of digital text storage and can be opened on virtually any device, operating system, or text editor.

History of TXT

Plain text files have existed since the earliest days of computing in the 1960s. The TXT format originated with ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), which was developed in 1963 as a standard character encoding for electronic communication. ASCII defined 128 characters including uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, punctuation, and control characters. The .txt file extension became the standard way to denote plain text files in early operating systems like MS-DOS and Unix. With the rise of international computing, extended character sets like ISO-8859 and eventually Unicode (including UTF-8, developed in 1993) expanded plain text to support all world languages and special characters while maintaining backward compatibility with ASCII.

Key Features and Uses

TXT files contain only the actual text content without any metadata about fonts, colors, sizes, or layouts. Each character is represented by a specific byte sequence according to the chosen encoding (ASCII, UTF-8, etc.). Line breaks are typically indicated by special characters (LF on Unix/Linux/Mac, CRLF on Windows). The simplicity of TXT files makes them extremely lightweight, fast to process, and compatible with virtually all software. They're human-readable when opened in any text editor, making them ideal for configuration files, source code, logs, documentation, and data exchange. TXT files can be easily parsed, searched, and manipulated using command-line tools and programming languages.

Common Applications

Plain text files are ubiquitous in computing and used for countless purposes: source code files (.py, .js, .java, .c), configuration files (config.txt, settings.ini), log files (error.log, access.log), README files, documentation, scripts, data exchange (CSV, JSON, XML are all text-based), notes, task lists, and simple documents. Programmers rely on TXT files for writing code in any programming language. System administrators use them for server configurations and shell scripts. Writers use plain text for drafting without formatting distractions. Data analysts use text-based formats like CSV and JSON for data processing. The format's universality, simplicity, and longevity make it indispensable in technology and everyday computing.

Advantages and Disadvantages