How can I view the binary contents of a file natively in Windows 7? (Is it possible.)
- by Shannon Severance
I have a file, a little bigger than 500MB, that is causing some problems.
I believe the issue is in the end of line (EOL) convention used. I would like to look at the file in its uninterpreted raw form (1) to confirm the EOL convention of the file.
How can I view the "binary" of a file using something built in to Windows 7? I would prefer to avoid having to download anything additional.
(1) My coworker and I opened the file in text editors, and they show the lines as one would expect. But both text editors will open files with different EOL conventions and interpret them automagically. (TextEdit and Emacs 24.2. For Emacs I had created a second file with just the first 4K bytes using head -c4096 on a linux box and opened that from my windows box.
I attempted to use hexl-mode in Emacs, but when I went to hexl-mode and back to text-mode, the contents of the buffer had changed, adding a visible ^M to the end of each line, so I'm not trusting that at the moment.
I believe the issue may be in the end of line character(s) used. The editors my coworker and I tried (1) just automagically recognized the end of line convention and showed us lines. And based on other evidence I believe the EOL convention is carriage return only. (2) return only.
are able to recognize and To know what is actually in the file, I would like to look at the binary contents of the file, or at least a couple thousand bytes of the file, preferablely in Hex, though I could work with decimal or octal. Just ones an zeros would be pretty rough to look at.
