What do the nouns text document , file , text file , binary mean?

Text document (text file): A file that can be opened with a program such as Notepad to view the clear code, usually with a name extension. txt .log .ini ..

Binary file: A file that cannot be opened with Notepad, the content of the file is machine code, and after forcibly opening it with a text class, you will see a bunch of garbled characters, and if the file is too large, it may cause a crash (occupy too much resources), but it can be opened with a binary program, such as a basic debug command. The most common extensions are.

exe .dll .com and ** formats.

A file is a collective term for all information stored on a computer, including text files and binary files.

A folder is a special file that points to (contains) several other files.

In the Microsoft operating system that we usually use, the meaning of these terms is roughly as follows:

A text document refers to a file composed of characters and text, etc., which is often composed of word, edit and other software, and each software often has its own unique file suffix.

Files are those things that can no longer be subdivided within folders that appear in Explorer, etc.

Text files mainly refer to: txt is the suffix of the file.

Binary files can be understood as stored in binary encoding. Generally, yes. bin is a suffix.

Modified it, there were some problems with the original, and I didn't pay much attention to it.

To put it simply, text documents are written with text software such as notepad and WordPad. txt or. Log is the smallest file in the computer, and the icons you can see after the folder can be understood as files, and binary files can be understood as stored with binary encoding.

Binaries differ from text files in terms of definition and access.

1. Differences in definition.

Text file: A text file is a computer file, which is a typical sequential file, and the logical structure of the file belongs to the streaming file. To put it simply, a text file is a file based on character encoding, and common encoding includes ASCII encoding, Unicode encoding, and so on.

Binary files: are value-based encoding files that allow you to specify what a value means depending on your application (such a process can be thought of as custom encoding). They are generally not readable directly by the user and can only be displayed through the corresponding software.

Binaries are generally executable programs, graphics, images, sounds, and so on.

As you can see from the above, the difference between a text file and a binary file is not physical, but logical. There is only a difference between the two in terms of encoding level, and text files are basically fixed-length encoding (there are also non-fixed-length encodings such as UTF-8). Binaries, on the other hand, can be thought of as variable-length encoding, because they are value encoding, and it's up to you to decide how many bits represent a value.

2. Differences in storage methods.

The text tool opens a file, first reads the binary bit stream that the file physically corresponds to, then interprets the stream according to the chosen decoding method, and then displays the interpretation results.

In general, the decoding method you choose will be in ASCII form (one character in ASCII code is 8 bits), and then it will interpret the file stream in 8 bits and 8 bits.

Notepad works according to the established character encoding (such as ASCII code) no matter what file is opened, so when he opens a binary file, it is inevitable that there will be garbled characters, and decoding and decoding do not correspond.

The storage and reading of text files is basically an inverse process. The access to binary files is similar to that of text files, except that the encoding and decoding are different.

The binary file is to output the data in the memory to the disk in the form of storage in the internal limb training side memory, that is, the original form of the data is stored. A text file is a binary data that is exported to disk in the form of a terminal of data, that is, it is in the form of a terminal where the data is stored.

Original Text: The computer is in physical memory.

All the storage on it is binary.

So the main difference between a text file and a two-bridge collapse base file is logically rather than physically. And from the perspective of the encoding of files, files can be divided into text files and binary files. Text files are based on character encoding.

Binary files are files based on value encoding, which can be regarded as variable-length encoding, and you can decide how many bits represent a value according to your needs.

If you're storing character data, it doesn't make any difference whether it's a text file or a binary file, so there's no point in discussing whether to use a text file or a binary file.

A: If you need to save and access data frequently, then you should use binary files for storage, which can save storage space and conversion time.

b: If you need to display data to or read data from the terminal frequently, then you should store it as a text file, which can save conversion time.

For example: 1) In text mode, carriage return is treated as a character''If a 0x1b is read in the file, the text mode will think that this is the file terminator, and the data will be converted accordingly in a certain way.

2) Binary mode''would be thought of as two characters 0x0d, 0x0a; When the 0x1b is read, the file is not processed in binary mode.

Recently, when writing a traversal to find the contents of a directory file, the function is normal when in use, and some abnormalities have been found. When a file is read, some binaries are read out, searching for the target string. This article will explain in detail how to correctly use the program to distinguish between two types of files (based on C).

The binary file referred to in this article refers to an executable file, or a non-text type file such as a binary file.

First of all, for the sake of file simplicity, we manually generate two files, a normal file and a binary executable.

Generate a normal file.

Generate an executable file.

When using grep to find hello, the two files are output as.

grep outputs a binary file when it encounters an executable file

This document defines a text file as a file that sequentially stores Unicode encoding or other encoded characters. Because not only can you store English, but you can also store some other characters such as expressions and line breaks.

The document is traversed in turn, and then compared to the characters in all possible encodings, and if all characters match the list of encoded characters, the current document is a text document.

However, the efficiency of this method is worrying, and there is an easier way. Of course!

When we open two files in hexadecimal mode, we will find a difference. At the same time, the hexadecimal system of a ** was compared.

**。In the hexadecimal preparation of the text file, the solution is virtually encoded, and the unicode symbols are also displayed in the text. It can also be deduced from the definition of a text file that non-ASCII cannot be used as a method of detecting binaries.

Therefore, the preliminary conclusion is that a file that does not contain null characters is a binary file.

But we can't judge from the beginning to the end of the file, so if we look at the grep and diff source code, we will find a macro.

Therefore, we take the length of a piece of data, and if it contains a null character, it is a non-text file, for example, 1024 bytes. This is because binaries typically have a header and the data length of the header is about 128 bytes. Take 1024 bytes to avoid filling the header as much as possible.

Of course, the above method is only for UTF-8 and ASCCII, if it is UTF-16 or UTF-32, it will also generate null characters in the data.

Using grep will also recognize it as a binary file, so don't do research down.

From the perspective of file encoding, files can be divided into ASCII code files and binary code files.

ASCII files, also known as text files, are used to store the corresponding ASCII code for each character returned to each byte when stored on disk. For example, the number 5678 is stored in the form asc code

Decimal code: 4 bytes in total. The ASCII code file can be displayed on the screen according to the characters, for example, the source program file is the ASCII file, and the content of the file can be displayed with the DOS command type.

Since it is displayed in characters, the contents of the document can be read.

Binary files are stored in binary encoding.

For example, the number 5678 is stored in the form of:

00101110 only takes up two bytes. Binary files can also be displayed on the screen, but their contents cannot be read. When processing these files, the system does not distinguish between types, but treats them as a stream of characters and processes them in bytes.

The start and end of the input and output character stream are controlled only by the program and not by physical symbols, such as carriage returns.

For this reason, such files are also referred to as "streaming files".