Every so often, if I open a non-text based document in either Microsoft Word or Notepad, it will open a massive file with an endless wall of completely garbled, gibberish text, most of the characters being either rectangle boxes or characters that can’t normally be typed. What does each of these characters represent? What happens if I insert or delete these characters?
Usually files would refuse to open with an incompatible format. How do these text-processing softwares somehow manage to run virtually any file?
In: 15
If the file isn’t text, it’s not going to look like text.
“Text” in computers is simply a list of numbers to look up letters in a table so that they can be printed on the screen. The number “65” represents the uppercase letter “A”, for example. Each letter, digit, punctuation mark, space, they all have numbers assigned to them and the application simply looks up in a table what to print when it sees the number.
Of course, there are more numbers than there are letters. When you open something that isn’t a “text file”, that is, a file where all the numbers match letters in that table, then the program has to improvise. If the numbers aren’t meant to be text, though, you just have a seemingly random bunch of numbers that the program tries to treat as text (because it’s designed to treat files as text). You’ll see the numbers matching letters here and there, but also numbers that are assigned to weird symbols that are not often used. Some of the numbers don’t even have a symbol assigned to them – in which case the program just shoves some placeholder in there (usually a square or something).
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