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Reading .mcn files? (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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Hello y'all,

I need to get some information out of a .mcn file that is used by the Cary WinUV program (for windows XP), I know the file contains the info we're looking for but it's not readable on a text editor as per screenshot (the same thing appears via OSS - code and cat). Same for Nano which gives me a lot of tiny amongi.

Cary WinUV for some reason doesn't display the information we want, who know what they were thinking.

Anyone know a way to read the characters missing?

EDIT: Thanks everyone, I solved by saving it into csv through Cary WinUV but that may not work for everyone so thanks for all the replies

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[–] 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)
  • hexdump comes stock with most distros, no editing features, but hexdump -C filename will at least let you see what’s in the file
  • from control characters and control codes, it looks like everything is separated by a set of three NUL characters (\00 in first screenshot or ^@ in the nano screenshot)
    • EDIT: so the field names are three NUL characters, text for the name, and SOH (^A) terminating the field name – then a padded line for the field values (values are probably meant to be fixed length)
  • if you don’t find anything more convenient, as a last resort, you can turn to perl and sed, they were originally designed for situations like this, trying to get meaningful data out of disparate file formats
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