Binary Format

A format for representing data used by some applications. The other main formats for storing data are text formats (such as ASCII and EBCDIC), in which each character of data is assigned a specific code number.

Binary formats are used for executable programs and numeric data, whereas text formats are used for textual data. Many files contain a combination of binary and text formats. Such files are usually considered to be binary files even though they contain some data in a text format.

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