Free TXT sample files
Unformatted text with no structure beyond characters and line breaks. The simplest possible upload. Download valid TXT test files in 10 exact sizes, from 1 KB to 10 MB, each with a checksum.
- Extension
- .txt
- MIME type
- text/plain
- Kind
- Text
- Category
- Documents
TXT files by size
Every file below is a valid Plain text file of exactly the stated size. Open a file's page for its checksum and contents, and to preview it in your browser before downloading.
| File | Size | Contents | Download |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 KB TXT samplesample-txt-1kb.txt | 1 KB1,024 bytes | Numbered lines: 8 | Download TXT |
| 5 KB TXT samplesample-txt-5kb.txt | 5 KB5,120 bytes | Numbered lines: 49 | Download TXT |
| 10 KB TXT samplesample-txt-10kb.txt | 10 KB10,240 bytes | Numbered lines: 101 | Download TXT |
| 25 KB TXT samplesample-txt-25kb.txt | 25 KB25,600 bytes | Numbered lines: 255 | Download TXT |
| 50 KB TXT samplesample-txt-50kb.txt | 50 KB51,200 bytes | Numbered lines: 512 | Download TXT |
| 100 KB TXT samplesample-txt-100kb.txt | 100 KB102,400 bytes | Numbered lines: 1,028 | Download TXT |
| 500 KB TXT samplesample-txt-500kb.txt | 500 KB512,000 bytes | Numbered lines: 5,148 | Download TXT |
| 1 MB TXT samplesample-txt-1mb.txt | 1 MB1,048,576 bytes | Numbered lines: 10,547 | Download TXT |
| 5 MB TXT samplesample-txt-5mb.txt | 5 MB5,242,880 bytes | Numbered lines: 52,743 | Download TXT |
| 10 MB TXT samplesample-txt-10mb.txt | 10 MB10,485,760 bytes | Numbered lines: 105,488 | Download TXT |
More TXT samples
Hand-designed files with realistic content or a specific edge case.
| File | Size | Contents | Download |
|---|---|---|---|
| UTF-8 text in many scriptssample-text-utf8-multilingual.txt | 906 B906 bytes | Scripts: Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Devanagari, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, emoji | Download TXT |
| Plain text with Windows (CRLF) line endingssample-text-crlf-line-endings.txt | 740 B740 bytes | Lines: 20 | Download TXT |
| Empty file (0 bytes)empty-file.txt | 0 B0 bytes | Lines: 0 | Download TXT |
| File name with spacessample file name with spaces.txt | 34 B34 bytes | File name length: 32 characters | Download TXT |
| File name with non-ASCII characterssample-ünïcödé-文件-имя.txt | 75 B75 bytes | File name scripts: Latin with diacritics, Han, Cyrillic | Download TXT |
| File with a 120-character namesample-long-file-name-abcdefghijabcdefghijabcdefghijabcdefghijabcdefghijabcdefghijabcdefghijabcdefghijabcdefghij-end.txt | 36 B36 bytes | File name length: 120 characters | Download TXT |
| File without an extensionsample-file-without-extension | 61 B61 bytes | ASCII text | Download TXT |
What is a TXT file?
A plain-text file is a sequence of characters with no markup, fonts or layout. What the bytes mean depends on the character encoding: today that is almost always UTF-8, which is identical to ASCII for unaccented English text.
Plain text has no signature bytes, so software identifies it by exclusion: if a file contains no control bytes and decodes as valid text, it is treated as text.
How to recognise a TXT file
No signature bytes. TXT files are identified by parsing their content.
| Extension | .txt |
|---|---|
| MIME type | text/plain |
| Encoding | UTF-8 is the modern default; ASCII is a subset of it |
| Line endings | LF on Unix and macOS, CRLF on Windows |
| Byte order mark | Optional in UTF-8 (EF BB BF) and best avoided |
| Signature | None |
What to test for
These are the behaviours that most often go wrong when software handles TXT files.
- Plain text compresses very well, so a 10 MB text file may travel as a fraction of that when gzip or Brotli is enabled. Use the BIN samples when you need incompressible bytes.
- Line endings change the byte count: converting LF to CRLF adds one byte per line, which breaks checksum comparisons.
- An empty or whitespace-only file is still a valid text file and is worth a test of its own.
Strengths of TXT
- Readable by every program ever written.
- No structure to break: a partly damaged file is still mostly usable.
Limitations of TXT
- The file does not say which character encoding it uses.
- No formatting, structure or metadata of any kind.
Typical uses of TXT test files
- Baseline upload and download tests
- Checking encoding handling
- Testing line-ending normalisation
- Measuring transfer speed with compressible content
Software that opens TXT
- Every text editor and IDE
- Notepad, TextEdit, VS Code, Vim
- Command-line tools such as cat, less, grep and wc
Specifications
Related
TXT sample files: questions
- Why does each line start with numbers?
- Each line carries its line number and the byte offset where it begins. If a transfer is truncated or corrupted you can see exactly where.
- Which encoding do the text samples use?
- The sized samples use only ASCII characters, which makes them valid UTF-8, ASCII and Latin-1 at once. A separate multilingual sample covers non-ASCII text.
- What is the MIME type of a TXT file?
- The MIME type is text/plain. The file extension is .txt.
- Is a sample TXT file the same as a dummy or example TXT file?
- Yes. Sample, test, dummy and example TXT files are different names for the same thing: a TXT file with known contents that stands in for a real one. Any file on this page will do wherever a tutorial or a test plan asks for a dummy TXT file.