Submitted 9 hours ago by LoveEspresso@cafe.coffee-break.cc to [deleted]
But .txt is not the same as .rs; yet .txt is not the same as .docx, although both of these files look the same to the human eye.
Nope. Wrong. There are thousands of file types, and while a handful of them fall somehow under your four categories, most of them actually don’t.
And calling .docx a “text file” is an insult to all honest text files.
There are thousands of types of file. They all contain data as a long sequence of numbers, and how those numbers are interpreted depends on the type of file - text characters, floating point numbers, pixel colour information or compressed data
images are pixel colour information while audio and video are compressed data ?
Depends on the file format. There is compressed and uncompressed audio - some times the numbers just represent the audio waveform (e.g. .wav) - some times with lossy lossless compression. Most, but not all, video formats are compressed due to the data size
I learned in computing that there are two: binary and text. If you open the file with a text editor and you can read some stuff, it’s text. If just random characters, it’s binary.
All files are binary. Text is just one interpretation.
There is structured text and formatted text.
There are index files.
There are databases.
There are mixed media files.
t.b.c.
Executable files.
A database is a file ?
Depends on the database system. But that’s often the case.
Well, unless it is an in-memory database (which isn’t too common), it needs to be stored on disk at some point. And for storing things on disk, you use one or more files.
Yes, of course. Even if it claims to be on a harddisk without a file system - which makes it the only file there :)
Someone will probably correct me – but the funny thing is that stuff like docx and xls are just a zipped/tarballed collection of different kinds of files. So I would add whatever the official term for “zipped/tarballed” to your list.
“Archive” is probably the word you’re looking for.
Don’t understand this.
Compressed files. Files that contain other files in a form that takes less space but needs more processing to access
DocX is a weird beastie, last time I researched the topic it ended up being like an XML database with a word document mask
the would not look the same if you read them raw; much of a docx file is formatting and other metadata
If you have a .docx file, rename it to .zip, and extract it. You’ll see it is just the .docx is just packaged text (and image) files.
If they look the same, you’re either using the wrong editor or the wrong font.
Not really.
For practical purposes, all files “binary”, ones and zeros. And with those ones and zeros, you can encode stuff for example text and for example with ascii en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII But you can also encode programs that can be executed, or what you named, visual, audio, or whatever you want. The differences are the “encodings”.
Sometimes, things work a bit like one of those Russian Matryoshka dolls, for example a PDF can contain a JPG or a PNG but also TXT.
It’s really not that simple as there being “4” types.
I’m not sure that answers your question though.
remon@ani.social 8 hours ago
There is only text files.
cheese_greater@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
I find it so incredibke u can record random audio rn and its turned sound into stone as text that 1000 monkeys could eventually type up by random