What Are DAT Files? ? ? ? ?

One of the most common questions concerning file extensions is what are .DAT files? DAT files are encountered frequently on many PCs and by many people. So what are DAT files? The simple answer is that DAT files are files which contain data. But that's all it tells us and, unfortunately, that's not enough.

The problem is that many applications use the file extension ".DAT" to indicate a file that contains a range of information which is usually stored in proprietary formats. Getting straight to the point this means that there is no standard way of interpreting DAT files, and no way of knowing how to open the file unless you know what program created it. DAT files can be music files, text, video, archives, binary data, or e-mail attachments in PDF format. A file with suffix DAT is just a file created to be read by the parent application that created it.

Let's see a practical example which is a common occurrence for most Instant Messenger users. I've read in a blog forum, that the Yahoo Instant Messenger (YIM) saves the chat log files with a .DAT extension. Now imagine you want to check the message history of yesterday's chat log in Yahoo. The file has to be opened when you are logged in to YIM, otherwise it will display only gibberish characters and symbols. Some people might think that since the YIM chat log contains text characters, if they try to open the .DAT file using some word processor like Notepad or WordPad, the file will display correctly anyway. However this is not the case.