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Nothing is ever simple. Even for the most basic .txt files it’s still useful to know what the character encoding is (utf? 8/16? Latin-whatever? etc.) and what the line format is (\n,\cr\lf,\n\lf) as well as determining if some maniac removed all the indentation characters and replaced them with a mystery number of spaces.

Then there are all the container formats that have different kinds of formats embedded in them (mov,mkv,pdf etc.)



A fun read in service of your first point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_hid_the_facts




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