Storage of Text

Data Files on ComputersText Files (ASCII)

Files that can be created by typing on the keyboard while using a text editor such as notepad or TextEdit.

Binary FilesFiles that cannot be created as above.

Note however that using a keyboard does not always result in a text file. For example, Word (or most word processing programs) store files as binary.

Storage of Text FilesNormally stored in ASCII which uses 8 bits

(one byte) for each keystroke.Can also be stored in unicode which uses 16

bits (two bytes) for each keystroke.

Text on Web PagesThere is a meta tag in the header of a Web

page which tells the browser which character set to use when displaying a page.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> shows that the page is using UTF-8 as the character set (a unicode set).

Other common character sets are: charset = ISO 8859-1 (English) charset = ISO 2022-CN (Chinese) charset = ISO 2022-JP (Japanese)