.dat file editing

[R.Youden]

I have a large .dat file that contains data that an application access. Does anyone know of a good .dat reader, I am using TextEdit and it is full of garbled junk and takes ages to open.

Is this possible?

Thanks for your help.

 

[eluk]

Sounds like a Windows system file i.e. user.dat. Editing it could screw your system.

 

[MisterMe]

I have a large .dat file that contains data that an application access. Does anyone know of a good .dat reader, I am using TextEdit and it is full of garbled junk and takes ages to open.

...

The .dat extension is commonly used for data files. It is, however, not a standard file format. Data files may be plain text, bitstreams, or whatever. It appears that yours is a non-ASCII bitstream. Without knowing the specifics of your application, no one on this forum can give you any useful information.

 

[R.Youden]

Right, about time I replied!

What I have is a game (Football Manager 2007) which runs on both Windows and PC. For the PC there is an application call Football Manager Scout. What it does is searches through this .dat file (I think) so you get information on players that you can't normally get in the game. I am starting to get into programming and I thought this would be a nice little project to see if I could do something similar for the mac.

 

[epochblue]

The .dat extension is commonly used for data files. It is, however, not a standard file format. Data files may be plain text, bitstreams, or whatever. It appears that yours is a non-ASCII bitstream. Without knowing the specifics of your application, no one on this forum can give you any useful information.

^^ This poster said it best. .DAT is a generic format; it's short for DATA and doesn't actually mean anything. It could hold textual data, binary data, anything. And if it's showing up garbled, like TPA said, sounds like a bitstream of some kind...

If you want a program for the Mac to read the file, you may well have to reverse engineer the file format.

 

[katie ta achoo]

tnef's enough!

Does that help at all? I keep getting winmail.dat emails and that opens 'em.

 

[MisterMe]

tnef's enough!

Does that help at all? I keep getting winmail.dat emails and that opens 'em.

TNEF's Enough is a utility which is specifically written to decode Microsoft Outlook mail attachments encoded in Microsoft's proprietary TNEF format. This is an example of the issue explained in my previous post. It will not help the OP solve his problem.