What Is a .txt File?
A .txt file is one of the simplest ways of storing information on a computer. It contains plain text without the complex formatting found in documents, spreadsheets or web pages.
Plain text, stored in a file
A .txt file is a plain-text file. The letters .txt are the file extension, which tells a computer that the file primarily contains text.
Unlike a Microsoft Word document, a .txt file does not normally contain information about fonts, colours, page layouts, images or complex formatting.
It is essentially a sequence of characters stored in a file.
What does a .txt file contain?
A text file might contain something as simple as:
There is no special document structure required here. These are simply characters and line breaks stored inside a file.
Simple files can be extremely useful
Lightweight
Text files usually require very little storage because they contain little more than the characters themselves.
Widely supported
Almost every operating system and programming language can read and write plain-text files.
Easy to inspect
A person can open a .txt file directly and see the information without needing specialist software.
Easy to process
Programs and scripts can search, transform and analyse text files very efficiently.
A .txt file can contain many kinds of information
The .txt extension does not dictate exactly what the text must represent.
A text file could contain notes, lists, configuration information, source data, logs, mathematical expressions, website content or information intended to be processed by another program.
What does UTF-8 have to do with .txt files?
Computers ultimately store information as numbers. A text encoding defines how those numbers correspond to characters such as letters, numbers and symbols.
UTF-8 is one of the most widely used character encodings. It can represent ordinary English text as well as characters from a huge range of languages and writing systems.
Important: a file ending in .txt is not automatically guaranteed to use UTF-8. Text files can use different character encodings.
When exchanging modern text data, UTF-8 is usually an excellent choice because it supports such a wide range of characters.
A text file is not the same as a formatted document
Suppose you write:
A .txt file mainly stores those characters.
A word-processing document may also store information describing the font, font size, colour, margins, paragraph spacing, images and many other formatting properties.
This is why plain-text files are often much simpler to process programmatically.
Many important file formats are text-based
Plain text is also the foundation of many structured formats used throughout computing and the web.
These formats add their own rules and structures, but the underlying content can still be represented as text.
This is one reason understanding plain text is so useful when working with data, websites, APIs and automation.
When is a .txt file useful?
Saving simple information
Notes, instructions, lists or other information that does not require visual formatting.
Moving data
Text can be transferred between different applications and computer systems with relatively little complexity.
Programming
Scripts can create, read, search and modify text files easily.
Automation
Text files can act as simple inputs, outputs, logs or intermediate data in automated processes.
Simple format. Huge usefulness.
A .txt file is simply a file containing plain text. Its simplicity makes it one of the most universal, portable and useful ways of storing information on a computer.
