![why do my word documents open with weird coding why do my word documents open with weird coding](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fd/Microsoft_Office_Word_(2019–present).svg/1200px-Microsoft_Office_Word_(2019–present).svg.png)
Plain text editors expect that each byte of the file corresponds to a single character (often from the ASCII table). It's worth mentioning that, technically, every file is stored in binary, even plain text files. I would suggest that you read this, however: How do I ask a good question? This question is probably better-suited for. Double-clicking an image file, for instance, tells the operating system to start up your image editing program and the OS tells the program to open the image. exe (which is also a simplification, but close enough). and a few other random bits of text.Īlso, files on your computer are not programs unless they end in. That's a fairly big simplification, but it's close enough and should help you understand.Īs you can see there must be some plain text stored in the format as well since we can read This program cannot be run in DOS mode. Since the data in the file is binary, the data isn't intended to be displayed as characters and we see a tonne of random characters.
#Why do my word documents open with weird coding series#
Text editors read each chunk of data (which can be thought of as a series of numbers) in sequence and convert the data into the corresponding text character. When you open a binary file in a text editor, it assumes that the file you told it to open is plain text and starts reading the data in. Images, programs, videos, music, and most other files are stored in various binary formats. Only plain text files are stored in, well, plain text.