Text versus Binary Files
Files on disk are always just sequences of bytes so how can there be two types, text and binary? The difference between text and binary files is not a physical difference on disk, but a difference in the way those bytes are_interpreted_
Consider storing the two dimensional coordinate (12, 31) to disk. Storing it as text would be in essence to print it to a file (instead of the screen). We can visualize the file contents to be,
------------------------- | 1 | 2 | , | 3 | 1 | EOF | -------------------------
where EOF is the character used to mark the end of a file. (The actual character used for the end of file marker is operating system dependent.) Of course what is actually written to disk are the ASCII values of those characters, so what is on disk is,
49 50 44 51 49 26
To be even more precise the values will be stored in binary so the disk contents will be,
00110001 00110010 00101100 00110011 00110001 00011010
Thank goodness the computer can read it!
What about storing it in a binary file? In this case we will write the binary representations of the numbers 12 and 31 to disk in sequence. The number of bytes used to do this on disk varies from 1 to 8, but using typical four byte representations we would write the following to disk:
00000000 00000000 00000000 00001100 00000000 00000000 00000000 00011111 00011010
As you can see both files have binary representations on disk so why do we call the first text and only the second binary? Because to be meaningful each should be interpreted differently. We call the first a text file because its bits should be interpreted as giving the ASCII values of text characters. We call the second binary because its bits should be read in four bytes at a time and interpreted as integer values. Notice that it doesn't say this inside the files. That knowledge has to be built into the suite of programs that create and manipulate the files.
Note that either representation could be read in as either text, i.e. a sequence of bytes corresponding to ASCII codes of characters, or binary, i.e. a pair of 4-byte wide integers, but that in each case the wrong interpretation produces nonsense. So knowing the correct interpretation is crucial. In everyday computing you can often tell which interpretation is correct by displaying some of the file to a terminal, or opening it in a 'pure' text editor, e.g. the IDLE editor. Here's a dump of a small Python program to a terminal,
ttopper@D1JWYSB1:~/Present/CPSC128.W13/08_Persistence
$ cat s2bin.py
# s2bin.py
# Converts from a string to its binary representation.
HEXBIN ={"0":"0000", "1":"0001", "2":"0010", "3":"0011", "4":"0100",
"5":"0101", "6":"0110", "7":"0111", "8":"1000", "9":"1001",
"A":"1010", "B":"1011", "C":"1100", "D":"1101", "E":"1110",
"F":"1111"}
s = '112,31'
for c in s:
n = ord(c)
print() "".join([HEXBIN[i] for i in '%X'%n]) )
ttopper@D1JWYSB1:~/Present/CPSC128.W13/08_Persistence
$
And here's a partial dump of an MS Word document,
ttopper@D1JWYSB1:~/Present/CPSC128.W13/08_Persistence
$ cat MSWordFile.doc
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As you can see it is easy to tell which file is a text file and which binary (though if you look toward the bottom of the dump of the word file you can see some text content).