

In its broadest sense, "flat file" may refer to any text file that has minimal or no formatting besides the use of the ASCII character set. The resulting file contains records - lines of text of a certain uniform length - but no formatting information, for example, about title or subtitle sizes and positions or information that a program could use to create a table of contents for the text file. In any event, many call a Microsoft Word document that has been saved as text only a flat file. There is some ambiguity about whether control characters such as line breaks can be included in a flat file. While the term "flat file" is most often used to describe a flat-file database, it can also refer to other types of files that don't resemble databases at all. A flat file database comprises a single table. Columns and rows are typically delimited by tabs or commas, such as in CSV files.
Flat file storage ikea code#
A CSV file is one in which table data is gathered in lines of American Standard Code for Information Interchange ( ASCII) text with the value from each table cell separated by a comma and each row represented by a new line. One of the most prominent flat file examples is a comma-separated values (CSV) file. The structure of a flat file is based on a uniform format as defined by the type and character lengths described by the columns. The information stored in a flat file is generally alphanumeric with little or no additional formatting.

The columns of the table represent one dimension of the database, while each row is a separate record. A flat file is a collection of data stored in a two-dimensional database in which similar yet discrete strings of information are stored as records in a table.
