TXT MIME Type

About Plain text files

Always add a charset: text/plain; charset=utf-8. Without it, browsers guess the encoding, and accented letters or emoji turn into mojibake like é. text/plain is also what browsers fall back to for unknown text, and the safest type for showing user-provided text, because it is never rendered as HTML.

File signature

TXT has no fixed signature: it is text without a magic number, so validate uploads by parsing the content rather than by checking bytes.

Serve .txt with the right Content-Type

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

text/plain txt text log;

AddType text/plain .txt .text .log
AddCharset UTF-8 .txt .text .log

@txt path *.txt *.text *.log
header @txt Content-Type "text/plain; charset=utf-8"

curl -sI https://example.com/file.txt | grep -i '^content-type'
# Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

Set the type in code

res.set('Content-Type', 'text/plain; charset=utf-8');

import mimetypes

mimetypes.add_type('text/plain', '.txt')  # if your system doesn't know it
mimetypes.guess_type('file.txt')[0]  # 'text/plain'

mime.AddExtensionType(".txt", "text/plain; charset=utf-8")
w.Header().Set("Content-Type", "text/plain; charset=utf-8")

Accept .txt uploads

<input type="file" accept=".txt,.text,.log,text/plain">

The accept attribute only filters the file picker; users can still choose another file. Listing the extension as well as the type matters, because operating systems don’t always report the type you expect.

Related types

• .csv (text/csv): CSV
• .md (text/markdown): Markdown
• .json (application/json): JSON

More data and text

.tsv , .ndjson , .jsonld , .xml , .yaml , .geojson , .ics , .sql . Look up any extension or type with the MIME type lookup.

Sources

• IANA registration: text/plain
• MDN: Common media types

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Frequently asked questions