The funny characters are markers indicating things like record start, record end, field separator and so on. Without knowing the actual protocol, it's a little hard to tell.
The data is a lot easier.
Between the 000f and 0002 markers you have a date/time field, 2nd of December 2008, 12:55:00.
Between 0002 and 0003 marker, it looks like a simple float which could be a dollar value or anytrhing really, it depends on what's at the other end of the link.
To separate it, I'm assuming you've read it into a variable character array of some sort. Just look for the markers and extract the fields in between them.
The date/time is fixed size and the value probably is as well (since it has a leading 0), so you could probably just use memcpy's to pull out the information you need from the buffer, null terminate them, convert the value to a float, and voila.
If it is fixed format, you can use something like:
static void extract (char *buff, char *date, char *time, float *val) {
// format is "\x01\x0fDDMMYYhhmmss\x02vvvvvvv\x03\x04"
char temp[8];
memcpy (date, buff + 2, 6); date[6] = '\0';
memcpy (time, buff + 8, 6); time[6] = '\0';
memcpy (temp, buff + 15, 7); temp[7] = '\0';
*val = atof (temp);
}
and call it with:
char buff[26]; // must be pre-filled before calling extract()
char dt[8];
char tm[8];
float val;
extract (buffer, dt, tm, &val);
If not fixed format, you just have to write code to detect the positions of the field separators and extract what's between them.