in windows normal text file can be saved as .txt extension. at the same time people are using .text format also to save normal text files. what is the difference between normal text file with .txt extension and .text extension

CodePudding user response：

A file extension is not a file format, it is just part of the name used by convention to indicate what is in the file, and what tool and options should be used to interact with it.

Some old systems - notably MS-DOS, and Windows before Windows 95 - had a fixed format for filenames allowing up to eight characters, a dot, then up to three characters. So there are many conventions for indicating file types in three characters. That restriction is now rarely relevant, so more recent conventions will often use longer extensions to be more obvious and less ambiguous.

".txt" is simply the conventional way to indicate "this is intended to be read as plain text" in three letters. ".text" indicates the same thing, but less abbreviated when not restricted to "8.3" filenames.

Neither name tells you any more about the file. For instance, to actually read the text you need to know what character encoding was intended. ASCII is a common baseline, sufficient for English text with simple punctuation, but there are a number of encodings which extend it (e.g. the ISO 8859 series, UTF-8), and also a number which are incompatible with it (e.g. UTF-16, many Chinese and Japanese encodings).