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