file-format – Page 2

Convert a shapefile (.shp) to xml/json

March 1, 2023 by Tarik

What dassouki said. Get GDAL from http://www.kyngchaos.com/software:frameworks. Use it to convert a shapefile to GeoJSON like this: $ ogr2ogr -f “GeoJSON” output.json input.shp eg $ ogr2ogr -f “GeoJSON” /tmp/world.json world_borders.shp world_borders $ cat /tmp/world.json { “type”: “FeatureCollection”, “features”: [ { “type”: “Feature”, “properties”: { “CAT”: 1.000000, “FIPS_CNTRY”: “AA”, “CNTRY_NAME”: “Aruba”, “AREA”: 193.000000, “POP_CNTRY”: 71218.000000 }, … Read more

How do I distinguish between ‘binary’ and ‘text’ files?

February 16, 2023 by Tarik

You can use the file command. It does a bunch of tests on the file (man file) to decide if it’s binary or text. You can look at/borrow its source code if you need to do that from C. file README README: ASCII English text, with very long lines file /bin/bash /bin/bash: ELF 32-bit LSB … Read more

Tools to help reverse engineer binary file formats

January 31, 2023 by Tarik

Here are some tips that come to mind: From my experience, interactive scripting languages (I use Python) can be a great help. You can write a simple framework to deal with binary streams and some simple algorithms. Then you can write scripts that will take your binary and check various things. For example: Do some … Read more

Write a file in UTF-8 using FileWriter (Java)?

January 25, 2023 by Tarik

Safe Encoding Constructors Getting Java to properly notify you of encoding errors is tricky. You must use the most verbose and, alas, the least used of the four alternate contructors for each of InputStreamReader and OutputStreamWriter to receive a proper exception on an encoding glitch. For file I/O, always make sure to always use as … Read more

What is the format of a patch file?

January 9, 2023 by Tarik

The -u option you used specifies the unified format. In that format the first two lines is a header: — is the original file, +++ is the new file, and the timestamps. @@ block headers That is then followed by chunks (change hunks) that starts with the @@ -R,r +R,r @@ syntax. Those are two … Read more

What is the difference between “JPG” / “JPEG” / “PNG” / “BMP” / “GIF” / “TIFF” Image?

December 29, 2022 by Tarik

Yes. They are different file formats (and their file extensions). Wikipedia entries for each of the formats will give you quite a bit of information: JPEG (or JPG, for the file extension; Joint Photographic Experts Group) PNG (Portable Network Graphics) BMP (Bitmap) GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) TIFF (or TIF, for the file extension; Tagged Image … Read more

Can a CSV file have a comment?

October 5, 2022 by Tarik

The CSV “standard” (such as it is) does not dictate how comments should be handled, no, it’s up to the application to establish a convention and stick with it.