It all depends on what you mean with manipulating textfiles and what you use them for, exactly...
In other words: both have advantages and disadvantages. Without knowing what you exactly want, there is no way to give you any advise or list the advantages.
In extremely short, without having the essential information of what you want it for:
Databases are good for stuff which you can order in tables and which might have raltionships in other tables and for things you need to read and save out of order and for a massive amount of data.
Text files are good for stuff like logs and other data which is mostly saved (and read) in sequential order. They are also very easly maintained.
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