Binary wordpad == URGENT

[bayareame]

Guys,

I am not sure whether this question exactly belongs to this forum, but I would very much appreciate it if anyone can answer the question. I have a program that writes its output as a binary file. I opened the file in wordpad. I was not able to read anything. Then I saved the file in wordpad. When I saved it, it said you would be losing the formatting. Now the same program that was able to read the datafile before is not able to read the new file. The question that I have is:

1. Can the binary file be recovered? I also know how the binary data was written.

2. Given the new file, can I tell whether it is a binary or someother file? When I saved it in wordpad, are there any special characters that are added at the end of each line which can be used to differentiate and it and tell that it is not a binary file? The platform I work with when I do all this is windows 2000.

Thank you very much for the help

[dglienna]

1) Nope. It is gone. I hope you can recreate it. If you had used Word, you might have gotten a backup copy (depending on how you have Word setup) but Wordpad doesn't allow that option. Next time, save it with a different name when you want to test things like that.

2) If you open it in Wordpad, save it as something else, or don't save it at all.
If you want to see if the file contains any data, you could open it in Notepad. The binary data will be easily recognizable. Again, don't save it unless you use a different name, as Notepad will destroy binary data.

[bayareame]

Thanks for the answers

2) If you open it in Wordpad, save it as something else, or don't save it at all.
If you want to see if the file contains any data, you could open it in Notepad. The binary data will be easily recognizable. Again, don't save it unless you use a different name, as Notepad will destroy binary data.[/QUOTE]

Since I know how the data was written, let us say we take the newfile that was saved in wordpad. Since for a computer, everything is a binary file, I search for characters that mark the end of line or something in this new binary file. Somebody told me that this was one of the ways you can differentiate between binary and other files. You search for this special characters in this new file and once you get them, it means that it is a wordfile or textfile . The thing that I wanted to know is: Given this newfile(that is corrupted because it was saved under some format), can I tell whether it was corrupted by text pad or word pad or someother known program?

thank you very much

[dglienna]

wordpad might put it's own header info it. I'm not sure. Save a blank file and look at it. Everything there would be in your file. You would never know what to replace it with, though.