Character Format.
Any file format in which information is encoded as characters using only
a standard character encoding scheme . A file written
in "character format" contains only those bytes that are prescribed in the
encoding scheme as corresponding to the characters in the scheme (e.g.,
alphabetic and numeric characters, punctuation marks, and spaces. A file
written in the ASCII character format, for instance,
would store the number "7" in eight bits (i.e., one
byte ): 00010111. A file written in
EBCDIC EBCDIC would store the number "7" in eight bits as: 11110111.
Contrast with binary format.
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