The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #115539   Message #2476760
Posted By: Artful Codger
26-Oct-08 - 05:31 PM
Thread Name: Tech: converting binary data to ASCII
Subject: RE: Tech: converting binary data to ASCII
As I mentioned, you can obtain od for DOS/Windows as freeware. And as long as you're able to capture the streamed data from Hyperterminal to a file, the piping limitation I mentioned is a non-issue for post-processing. However, od only converts the raw bytes to character equivalents. It sounds as if you're dealing with formatted, record-oriented binary output, and to convert that you'd need a customized script. Such a thing could be hacked together fairly easily in a language like Perl or even (gag me) Visual Basic; Perl was specifically designed to handle conversion tasks like this, though it has evolved into much more. But as you're not a programmer, learning the language and writing the script might be heavy going.

Another conversion consideration: If you intend to import into Excel, you must write the converted data into a proper database import format--a raw data file isn't sufficient. Fortunately, some formats, like CSV, are character-based and pretty simple; essentially, you'd just have to supply the table and field names, then the rows of data values with proper delimiters between, and indicate when the end of the table is reached with a blank line. On the other hand, I suspect that whatever you'd need Excel for could be done more easily and better by the converter script itself.