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Doc Brown
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There are virtually dozens of reasons why separating text files from the program which reads and processes them can be beneficial, even if the program is written in a scripting language (so in a text file itself) and both are always deployed together. By separating the text file, you can

  • hand it over to another person who has no knowledge of the scripting language or programming at all and let the person create or maintain the file

  • use a completely different editor (for example, a spreadsheet application), to maintain the text file

  • give the data a version number different from the program

  • let the same, untouched program process different variants of the text file (for example, for testing purposes, or for different, customized instances of the database)

  • reuse the same script to populate different tables in your database easily from different text files, without the need to create a large, unmaintainable BLOB of a >10000 lines script

I guess if you think twice about the question, you can extend this list by a lot of further points by yourself.

Doc Brown
  • 220.5k
  • 35
  • 410
  • 625