File Format

File formats define how information is encoded for storage in a computer file, spanning images (PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, AVIF), audio (WAV, MP3, OGG, FLAC), video (MP4, MOV, MKV), documents (PDF, HTML, DOCX, ODT), data serialization (JSON, XML, YAML, CSV, Parquet, Avro), archives (ZIP, TAR, GZIP), and executables. File formats are central to API and data interoperability, identified via filename extensions, magic numbers, MIME types, and IANA media-type registrations.