Editing Binary file (section)

== Background and terminology ==
All modern computers store information in the form of [[bit]]s (binary digits), using [[binary code]]. For this reason, all data stored on a computer is, in some sense, "binary". However, one particularly useful and ubiquitous type of data stored on a computer is one in which the bits represent text, by way of a [[character encoding]]. Those files are called "[[text files]]" and files which are not like that are referred to as "binary files", as a sort of [[retronym]] or [[hypernym]].

Some "text files" contain portions that are actually binary data,  and many "binary files" contain portions that are encoded text; for instance, textual data may be stored as a field within the binary format, or arbitrary constants may have been chosen to correspond to ASCII letters as a mnemonic (this is common for [[file magic number]]s). These mixed binary-and-text file are usually regarded as "binary", because an application that can only process text will not know what to do with them.

It is quite common for a text file to use its text to encode data that could be encoded in binary some other way; a text file that does this is still regarded as a text file, and not a binary file, so long as it remains within the previously-stated constraints about what the bits of the file represent. For example, in a binary file, the number 250 could be encoded in bits as the sequence 11111010. It could also be encoded in a text file (for example, a programming language source file) as the digits 2, 5, 0; which would in turn be encoded by the bits in the text file as (for example, using [[UTF-8]]) 00110010, 00110101, 00110000.