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 not a particularly sophisticated program. If you tell it to open a file it will treat it as if it were text regardless of whatever is actually in there.
Text files are laid out sequentially with letters and numbers listed in the order they appear with special characters for spaces, returns, etc
So Notepad interprets the binary info in the file into text characters based on the ASCII table
Since there’s no text in most of a file it comes out as a bunch of gobbledygook.
But sometimes you’ll see text appear because there’s text in the file, like for a prompt, a filename, or whatever.
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