XML file editing problem

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XML file editing problem

I've a directory consisting of .xml files only, installed by a third party application. While I can read and edit some of the XML files, some are not readable in Notepad++/Notepad. In Notepad++, I see this for one of them. These files are not corrupted, for sure.

I somewhere read that this might be encrypted XML?

EDIT:

I tried 'file' command but found nothing useful. I've uploaded one file here. It's less than 1KB. Could someone please help me with this file?

It could imaginably be encrypted; alternatively, Notepad could just be using the wrong code page. Have you tried the usual suspects for possible encodings?

Joe Mabel 2009-12-19 23:23:21

@Joe: could you please suggest the usual suspects?

understack 2009-12-19 23:31:00

I'm not sure how much control of this Notepad even gives you, but for example this could be UTF-16 looked at as if it were some 8-bit format.I guess the leading suspects are (in no particular order) UTF-16, UTF-8, maybe UTF-32, Code page 1252. But there are a ton of others: see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa752010%28VS.85%29.aspx. Naturally, most of these shouldn't be used for XML, but it's hard to know what's wrong with an unreadable file.

Joe Mabel 2009-12-19 23:42:28

@joe: I tried to play with all the available encodings (including mentioned by you) in Firefox but none of them worked.

understack 2009-12-20 00:05:41

Oh, well. Then it's looking like it is indeed encrypted or compressed. Best of luck.

Joe Mabel 2009-12-20 18:40:45

I suggest using file or a similar utility to guess the file's actual type/encoding. If you don't have the file command, you can download it from http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/file.htm (Notepad++ may provide similar functionality, I'm not familiar with Notepad++ other than recognizing the name)

2009-12-19 23:29:50

I can't find anything using Python and the typical UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32, ISO-8859-1 or Windows code page 1252. I checked out the file, hoping it was a simple XOR encryption, but it wasn't. Perhaps the file is corrupt? Can you open it in a normal Windows text editor and view its contents at all? Does Internet Explorer have any trouble displaying the file?

Dustin 2009-12-20 00:15:47

@Dustin: I tried these encodings in Firefox by renaming file to a text file. Characters looked very similar to as I posted in question. Normal notepad only shows boxes.

understack 2009-12-20 00:28:18

Here's a dumb question: what are these files **supposed** to contain?

Michael Petrotta 2009-12-20 00:31:28

@Michael: it is suppose to contain XML data.

understack 2009-12-21 11:25:53

Is there any chance this could be the Binary XML format which stackoverflow was discussing just the other day?

AmbroseChapel 2009-12-20 11:00:22

@anbrose: It was me who started that thread but later I figured this was not that 'binary XML' because I played with all the mentioned technology in 'binary XML' and it didn't work.

understack 2009-12-21 11:25:22

ansaurus

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XML file editing problem

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