file input/output (continueddecimal code character meaning lowercase lowercase lowercase lowercase ascii is very useful format to use for text files as they can be read by wide range of editors and browsers these editors and browsers make it very easy to create human readable files howeverprogramming languages such as python often use different set of character encodings such as unicode character encoding (such as utf- unicode is another standard for representing characters using various codes unicode encoding systems offer wider range of possible character encodings than asciifor example the latest version of unicode in may unicode contains repertoire of , characters covering modern and historic scriptsas well as multiple symbol sets and emojis howeverthis means that it can be necessary to translate ascii into unicode ( utf- and vice versa when reading and writing ascii files in python another option is to use binary format for data in file the advantage of using binary data is that there is little or no translation required from the internal representation of the data used in the python program into the format stored in the file it is also often more concise than an equivalent ascii format and it is quicker for program to read and write and takes up less disk space etc howeverthe down side of binary format is that it is not in an easily human readable format it may also be difficult for other programsparticularly those written in other programming languages such as java or #to read the data in the files sequential access versus random access data can be read from (or indeed written toa file either sequentially or via random access approach sequential access to data in file means that the program reads (or writesdata to file sequentiallystarting at the beginning of file and processing the data an item at time until the end of the file is reached the read process only ever moves forward and only to the next item of data to read random access to data file means that the program can read (or writedata anywhere into the file at any time that is the program can position itself at particular point in the file (or rather pointer can be positioned within the fileand it can then start to read (or writeat that point if it is reading then it will read the next data item relative to the pointer rather than the start of the file if it is writing data then it will write data from that point rather than at the end of the file if there is already data at that point in the file then it will be over written this type of access is