Computing mavens: Base64 to binary conversion

[Sindawe]

K folks, I need to tap your brains.  Back in the day, it was common practice to post up images, execuatable and the like on Usenet as a string of what looked like ASCII characters, then others could copy and convert that string of characters back to their original format for use on their own PCs.

Its been 10+ years since I've done this and it was on another OS, so I've forgotten most of the details on this sort of stuff.  Well in my current job, we've got an email message with pages and pages of what looks like basic ASCII that we think is sourced from a .ZIP file.  Does anybody know of utilities available that will faciliate checking this premise and converting the ASCII back to its original binary format?

[Headless Thompson Gunner]

Copy the email text into a basic text document.  Save it with a .zip filename.  Try to unzip it.

[GigaBuist]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uuencode

Try and find a version of the uuencode / uudecode utilities for your OS.

[mtnbkr]

I used uuencode back in the day, but HTG's suggestion may very well work.  I've done that before when an email system tries to inline an attachment like that.

Chris

[Tallpine]

Does anybody know of utilities available that will faciliate checking this premise and converting the ASCII back to its original binary format?

I've used a thing called "hex editor" (XVI32 2.4) by Christian Maas.  It's helpful for looking at data and even exe files.

I'm not even sure where I got it now.

Otherwise, I could probably write an ASCII to binary utility in about 30 minutes.

[Tallpine]

Well, Sindawe - did you ever figure it out ...? 

[Sindawe]

Nope.  Our best assessment is that the conversion is corrupt and unrecoverable.  WinZip could not figure it out, nor could several ancient text to binary conversion programs.

[Tallpine]

So what does the sender (a customer ...?) have to say about this file?

Why did they send it to you and what do they want you do to with it



As far as "text to binary conversion" - there is really no such thing other than the way you look at the file contents.  The (any) file is nothing more than a series of bytes (each one representing 0-255).  If you open such file in a text editor, it's just going to display the ASCII character associated with that number (a char may be "unprintable" such as Bell or Backspace).  If it wasn't intended to be text in the first place, then you're going to see mostly gibberish.

You probably knew all that anyway .... 

I could write a program that displayed 'A' as "10000001" but that probably wouldn't help you very much. 

[Firethorn]

Most programs that deal with these systems (mail and usenet clients) today have the capability to automatically deal with the data.

If it didn't, that's likely a signal of corruption, and that's something that your standard zip program can't deal with.

If it'd been a RAR where somebody got paranoid with the recovery data, you might get lucky.