Crosswords0 min ago
Putting an extension on a filename
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Why does putting an extension like like .jpg or .doc make the file suddenly readable if it hadn't been before? Why doesn't the computer know what it is if a paint program, for example, saves a file only as 'picture' and not 'picture.jpg'
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Microsoft use file extensions so they can associate different file types with different applications. For instance document.doc is associated with Word as .doc files will cause Word to open. If I had simply document you would need to go through all applications you have installed on your PC to view it.
The computer _ought_ to be able to tell what kind of file it is without an extension, because lots of different file type definitions require a few bytes early in the file to say what kind of file it is. (An obvious example is <HTML> at the beginning of a web page.) Sadly, this subtlety seems to have escaped Microsoft.
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