Text File Previews

You can preview many types of text based documents, such as source code files, structured data files, unformatted text files, and markdown files. Source code files include syntax highlighting for most language types.

Site administrators can customize your site's Viewer & Editor settings to supply additional file extensions that should use the text previewer.

One common reason to enable this option is to prevent automatically converting a delimited file, such as CSV, to a spreadsheet file. You might choose to view CSV files directly within files without converting to avoid problems with large numbers or non-standard date formats.

Another reason to add an extension to your previewer is when a system produces plain text files with a nonstandard extension. For example, if you transfer a delimited text file for invoices that ends in the extension ".inv", you wouldn't be able to preview those files without adding the extension to your site's settings.

Our previewer supports over 280 programming languages' associated files. If you're using standard extensions for your source files, you will almost assuredly be able to preview those files within Files.com with automatic syntax highlighting.

For source code files that do not use a standard extension, you can add that extension as a custom text file extension for your site. This will allow you to preview the files within Files.com, but will not include automatic syntax highlighting.