The EOF is a special
character, whose ASCII value is 26, which indicates the end of a file in text
mode of file. While writing data to a file, this character is inserted
automatically after the last character in the file to mark the end of file. If
this character is detected at any point in the file, the read function would
return the EOF signal to the program indicating the last point of file. An
attempt to read after EOF might either cause the program to terminate with an
error or result in an infinite loop situation. Thus, the last point of file is
detected using EOF while reading data from file. Without this mark, we can not
detect last character at the file such that it is difficult to find up to what
time the character is to be read while reading data from the file.
There are mainly three difference between binary and text mode. They are as follow. i. In text mode, a special character EOF whose ASCII value is 26 is inserted after the last character in the file to mark the end of file. But, there is no such special character present in the binary mode. The binary mode files keep track of the end of file from the number of characters present in the directory entry of the file. ii. In text mode of file, text and numbers are stored as one character per byte. For example, the number 1234 occupies two bytes in memory but it occupies 4 bytes (one byte per character) in the file. But, in binary mode, the number occupies the number of bytes as it occupies in the memory. Thus, the above number occupies two bytes in file also in the case o...
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