How to open problematic data dump and convert it to mysql (or some other practical format)?

Question

I'm trying to work with pretty interesting data set. Unfortunately, I have problems with opening it and converting it into any useful format. It's collection of archived txt files. When i decompress them and try to open txt file i get 'it's binary file, saving it may result in corrupt file' and it's unreadable - there are just 'weird characters', nothing i could manually read. Tried to use grep but it's also complaining that it's binary. I tried to import it into mysql database but when i tried to execute LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE ‘/path/to/file.txt’ INTO TABLE tablename I got ERROR 1064 (42000). I don't know what to do to open it.

Answer 1

I'm going to take a wild guess here and say they're not really text files :-)

And until you figure what they are, trying to import them via different methods is not going to be the most productive course of action.

Can you post (a hex code of) headers for those files? If they have magic sequence in front, it should help with figuring out what they are.