Sample TXT File Download

Which Sample TXT File Should You Use?

How to Download, Inspect, and Read a TXT Test File

The examples below use standard command-line tools (file, iconv, od, wc), which are preinstalled on macOS and most Linux distributions, plus Python and JavaScript. The output shown is what you get with the files on this page.

Step 1: Download the file

Click Download file next to any sample above, or fetch it from the command line. Each file has a stable direct URL, so you can also download it in a CI job.

# Download a single file
curl -O https://samples-files.com/samples/documents/txt/sample1.txt

# Download every encoding test file
curl -O https://samples-files.com/samples/documents/txt/sample4-utf8-multilingual.txt \
     -O https://samples-files.com/samples/documents/txt/sample5-utf8-bom.txt \
     -O https://samples-files.com/samples/documents/txt/sample6-utf16le.txt \
     -O https://samples-files.com/samples/documents/txt/sample7-latin1.txt

Step 2: Detect the encoding

file -i guesses the encoding from the content. To see a BOM for certain, dump the first bytes.

$ file -i sample4-utf8-multilingual.txt sample6-utf16le.txt sample7-latin1.txt
sample4-utf8-multilingual.txt: text/plain; charset=utf-8
sample6-utf16le.txt:           text/plain; charset=utf-16le
sample7-latin1.txt:            text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

# Look at the first bytes to spot a BOM
$ head -c 8 sample5-utf8-bom.txt | od -An -tx1
 ef bb bf 55 54 46 2d 38
$ head -c 8 sample6-utf16le.txt | od -An -tx1
 ff fe 55 00 54 00 46 00

Step 3: Convert to UTF-8

When you know the source encoding, iconv converts it to UTF-8 without losing any characters.

# Convert Latin-1 and UTF-16 to UTF-8
$ iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 sample7-latin1.txt > latin1-as-utf8.txt
$ iconv -f UTF-16 -t UTF-8 sample6-utf16le.txt > utf16-as-utf8.txt

Step 4: Check line endings and line counts

cat -A shows invisible characters, so a Windows line ending appears as ^M$. Note that wc -l counts newline characters, so a file without a final newline reports one line fewer.

# Show line endings: ^M$ means CRLF, $ alone means LF
$ head -n 2 sample8-crlf.txt | cat -A
Windows Line Endings (CRLF)^M$
===========================^M$

# Convert CRLF to LF (use dos2unix if you have it)
$ sed 's/\r$//' sample8-crlf.txt > sample8-lf.txt

# Count lines
$ wc -l sample9-large.txt sample10-empty.txt
 15000 sample9-large.txt
     0 sample10-empty.txt

Step 5: Read it in your code

Always pass the encoding explicitly in Python. Without it, Python uses the system default, so the same script can work on Linux and fail on Windows.

# 1. Wrong encoding: Latin-1 bytes are not valid UTF-8
try:
    open("sample7-latin1.txt", encoding="utf-8").read()
except UnicodeDecodeError as e:
    print(e)  # 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xe9 in position 195: invalid continuation byte

text = open("sample7-latin1.txt", encoding="latin-1").read()  # correct

# 2. BOM: "utf-8" keeps it, "utf-8-sig" strips it
open("sample5-utf8-bom.txt", encoding="utf-8").readline()      # '\ufeffUTF-8 with BOM\n'
open("sample5-utf8-bom.txt", encoding="utf-8-sig").readline()  # 'UTF-8 with BOM\n'

# 3. UTF-16: the BOM tells Python the byte order
open("sample6-utf16le.txt", encoding="utf-16").readline()      # 'UTF-16 LE Sample\n'

# 4. Line endings: text mode converts CRLF to \n, newline="" keeps it
open("sample8-crlf.txt").readline()              # 'Windows Line Endings (CRLF)\n'
open("sample8-crlf.txt", newline="").readline()  # 'Windows Line Endings (CRLF)\r\n'

# 5. Large file: iterate line by line instead of read()
with open("sample9-large.txt") as f:
    print(sum(1 for _ in f))  # 15000

# 6. Empty file: make sure your code handles ""
print(repr(open("sample10-empty.txt").read()))  # ''

In the browser, use the built-in TextDecoder:

// Run in the browser console on this page
const res = await fetch("/samples/documents/txt/sample6-utf16le.txt");
const bytes = await res.arrayBuffer();

// TextDecoder strips the BOM and decodes the bytes you tell it to
console.log(new TextDecoder("utf-16le").decode(bytes).split("\n")[0]);
// "UTF-16 LE Sample"

// fatal: true throws instead of inserting U+FFFD replacement characters
const latin1 = await (await fetch("/samples/documents/txt/sample7-latin1.txt")).arrayBuffer();
try {
  new TextDecoder("utf-8", { fatal: true }).decode(latin1);
} catch (e) {
  console.log("Not valid UTF-8:", e.message);
}