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?
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Notepad is basically a universal file viewer. It is programmed in such a way that you can literally drag any file onto it and it will display it… Or try to display it. If you try to open an image, for example, it will basically convert the data that makes up the image into a bunch of characters that are text-based. Technically the file is still valid and correct, it’s just being read in a way that we can’t decipher. (Like how we can see things that are on the visible spectrum, but not things that are infrared. Those things are still there, but our eyes don’t work that way).
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