Text files may seem like the most fanastic, ubiqutous and simple format. Almost all programmes seem to be able to cope with reading and writing them interchangeably, which is great. They aren't quite a simple as you might think. Back in the dark ages of computing, when space was at a premium and even text files seemed large, most people in compuging spoke English, so they thought that a single Byte would be enough to store all the letters. This lead to a nice, efficient, simple encoding called ASCII.
It turned out that one byte doesn't store enough characters (it only gives you 256 and that includes lowercase and uppercase letters and all punctuation). To fill the gap, hundreds of different formats sprang up. They were all slightly different. Many of these will work fine even if you interpret them as ASCII but some won't.
This was no good, you had to try and guess the format of any text file before you could read or understand it. A sollution