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, are considered 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, padding bytes, 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 to dealing with tables instead. This has a major advantage in that anyone can use SQL to filter the text in the file. 4)When data corruption occurs in a text file, it is often easier to recover and continue processing the remaining contents. 5)A simple text file needs no additional metadata to assist the reader in interpretation, and therefore 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 freely interchanged 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 same data 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 that give 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 web page after being interpreted by a web browser. Similar schemes include LaTeX, used for laying out 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 possible and to minimize the use of binary code.It is used for system and application configuration information. A major advantage of this approach is ease of access and modification, which can be 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) specialized programs that transform plain text data in some meaningful way. They are designed to be linked together using pipes (represented in commands by the vertical bar character) to form pipelines of commands that can have great power and flexibility. 12)Some operating systems, such as Solaris, the most popular proprietary Unix-like operating system, maintains a binary version of certain system databases in addition to the plain text version as a means of optimizing system performance. The plain text version is retained as a human interface to the binary version,i.e.,in order to be able to easily read and modify it.
13)Flat file databases are still used internally by many computer applications to store configuration data. Many applications allow users to store and retrieve their own information from flat files using a pre-defined set of fields.Typical examples of flat files are /etc/passwd and / etc/group on Unix-like operating systems.These flat files are generally written in plain-text format. 14)Text files are a better option than xml files in data structure when the data is being transmitted because it is compact and dont add unnecessary noise to the data.
