TXT (Plain Text File)

The TXT file type is one of the oldest and simplest file types available and has been used within computer systems for many decades. Earlier examples of text files were developed to store characters using the ASCII format for text encoding, though over the years, additional encodings have been used.

The format offers some advantages over other formats in that you do not have to worry about the padding of bytes in the file or the "endianness" or word size of the machine reading the TXT file. Many formats, such as XML, JSON, and a host of others, are all based on text files.