I'm afraid above is NOT the binary representation of a well-formed text file (many zero bytes, mal-formed multibyte chars, malformed single byte chars, ...).
While
would reconstruct an ASCII file, the result of it applied to every other line of your file yields
A few chars are recognizable ("\", "A", "B", etc), but the main part is garbage.
Im wondering how I can convert a binary file to a text file?
What a "binary file" and what a "text file" is is primarily determined by the files contents. So there is no "conversion" between the two, like "convert CSV to Excel format". The latter is just two representations of the same thing - tabular data - but the former are simply different types of contents.
There are (today rather unusual) meanings of "text file" as containing compiled code (calling a relocatible object file before linking "text" was the IBM speak of the seventies) and if you are using the term this way you will have to use a linker. If you are using "text" in the more common meaning of "sequences of characters transporting meaning to a reading human" then there is no (common!) way to transform one into the other.
There are of course programs which use binary representations for text files (simpliest example is a packing program which packs a text file into something binary). In such a case you need to specifically reverse the algorithm (i.e use an unpack-program to restore the text file), but this means to know the used algorithm first. And even this only works if a text file was packed beforehand. Put a binary file in and another binary file will come out, packing or no packing.
If you want to search for text parts inside a binary file, this is possible: use the strings command to list readable strings within otherwise binary files:
This looks like packed decimal to me.
The fields that look like '00 00 00 c6' appear to be cobol S9(7) COMP 3.
And on your machine, the hd program reverses the digits in each byte so that it is probably
0000006c on disk.
Hi All,
I have a binary file which is being exported from a Database, and i need to convert that to ASCII format. How can i achieve that? And this solution should work for any file which is given to us; means they will give different files from different tables.
Thanks in advance. (8 Replies)
Hi All,
I do have a file with many lines (rows) and it is space delimited. For example: I have a file named SR345_pl.txt. If I open it in an editor, it looks like this:
adfr A2 0.9345
dtgr/2 A2 0.876
fgh/3 A2 023.76
fghe/4 A2 2345
bnhy/1 A3 3456
bhy A3 0.9876
phy A5 0.987
kdrt A5... (9 Replies)
Hello guys,
We had to move from a DC to another, and we are now facing an "issue" with some text files.
Looks like that some of our log files are set as binary:
file TuxConnectorURA.20121012
TuxConnectorURA.20121012: data or International Language text
less TuxConnectorURA.20121012... (2 Replies)
I have a text file with irregular spacing between values which makes it really difficult to manipulate. Is there an easy way to convert it into a space delimited text file so that all the spaces, double spaces, triple spaces, tabs between numbers are converted into spaces. The file looks like this:... (5 Replies)
Not sure the most effient way to do this.
I have figiured out how to extract columns with shell script, but not sure how to convert
This is what I have...
NEWDNS 04-Jun-2011 06:00:59.762 10.220.136.217 crl.verisign.com
This is what I need.... Change date, remove mil seconds,... (1 Reply)
In Unix/Ksh, when I try to look inside a file it says that the file may be a binary file and if I want to see it anyway. When i say 'yes', it shows me the content filled with unreadable symbols (looks like binary). Is there a command that I can run from the Unix prompt to convert/translate that... (3 Replies)
Hi,
I need to convert a text file formatted like this ("tshark -z conv,ip" output) to HTML:
=====================================================================================================
IPv4 Conversations
Filter:<No Filter>
| <- ... (4 Replies)
Hi all,
I have a print control file (dflt) for Oracle which is in binary. As I am going to develope an application in Window environment, I would like to reference the dflt file. But it is in binary format and I cannot access it. Anyone can suggest me how to convert the file into text or... (5 Replies)
I have a text file that is the output of a Netbackup report. The file it generates is just a plain text file with only white space between fields. For example:
Date Policy Type Kilobytes Retention
12/5/2005 WinNT Full 18329948 6 Months
I... (4 Replies)