Difference between binary files and text files?

Answer 1

"ASCII file" refers to a "text" file that is readable by the naked eye (it only contains the letters a-z, numbers, carriage returns, and punctuation marks). Conversely, a binary fie is not readable by the naked eye (it contains the ASCII characters in addition to binary codes).

Answer 2

One of the least-understood aspects of FTP transfers is the difference between ASCII and Binary mode data transfers. ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, and is a type of character encoding based on the English language used on devices that handle information stored in text. It includes 33 non-printed control characters and 94 printed characters such as letters and punctuation. When files are transferred in ASCII mode, the transferred data is considered to contain only ASCII formatted text. The party that is receiving the transferred data is responsible for translating the format of the received text to one that is compatible with their operating system. The most common example of how this is applied pertains to the way Windows and UNIX handle newlines. On a Windows computer, pressing the "enter" key inserts two characters in an ASCII text document - a carriage return (which places the cursor at the beginning of the line) and a line feed (which places the cursor on the line below the current one). On UNIX systems, only a line feed is used. ASCII text formatted for use on UNIX systems does not display properly when viewed on a Windows system and vice versa. Binary mode refers to transferring files as a binary stream of data. Where ASCII mode may use special control characters to format data, binary mode transmits the raw bytes of the file being transferred. In this way, the file is transferred in its exact original form.

Answer 3

A text file is a file that is properly understood as a sequence of character data (represented using ASCII, Unicode, or some other standard), separated into lines. Typically, when a text file is displayed as a sequence of characters, it is easily human-readable.

A binary file is anything else. A binary file will include some data that is not written using a character-encoding standard - typically, some number would be represented using binary within the file, instead of using the character representation of its various digits (in some base).