Generally, we come across the following issues while attempting to handle large files:

As the file size increases, handling them becomes a tedious task. For example, the event log files for some common applications that generate a large amount of data could be more than 1GB in size and we may need to read them. These large text files may also vary with respect to the lines they have or the reason they need to be opened for. Besides, they may or may not contain the text in specific formats, such as comma-separated values (CSV), log data files (LDF) and master data files (MDF). The files generated in the situations mentioned earlier could be of any size, format or encoding. Figure 1: Error with Notepad for a file size greater than 1GB Figure 2: Notepad++ text editor logo Data files can be stored as text files or as binary files, and are particularly helpful when debugging a program. The difference between a log file, a text file and a data file is that a log file is generated automatically to keep track of some specific application, a text file is created by the user in a word processor, and a data file stores data pertaining to a specific application for later use. There may be various other scenarios as well but, generally, all these data and log files are text files.

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