File format recognition hard mode

February 12, 2014 2:36 PM

In a old old inherited MS SQL Server database, in a column named 'Image' of type TEXT we've discovered an encoded image (we assume). And even if its not critical to the work we are doing, its damnably intriguing. Can you help me crack its provenance ?

As the content may or may not be commercially sensitive, I'm not going to post it in its entirety, but here is a snippet

<7b5c7274 66315c61 6e73695c 64656666 305c6465 66746162 3732307b 5c666f6e 7474626c 7b5c6630 5c666e69 6c5c6663 
....
 65722e51 756f7465 4944207d 7d235c70 6c61696e 5c66315c 66733136 5c636630 5c622030 36303031 38377d7d 7d0d0a7d>

The blob is around 2000 sets of 8 hexadecimal numbers, not the base64 encoding I'd use or expect.

We've found a similar pattern in a .draw (?) file discovered online http://www.vorlesungen.uni-osnabrueck.de/informatik/pt/code/Html/Sommeruni/drawings/7.draw so the encoding is not unique at least.

If this a Windows-thing that would be comforting to know. Or any tips that can be offered to get to the bottom of our mystery.

posted by handybitesize to Technology (3 answers total)

Best answer: This is RTF stored as ASCII.

Decoded, it looks like this:

{\rtf1\ansi\deff0\deftab720{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcer.QuoteID }}#\plain\f1\fs16\cf0\b 0600187}}}
}

To see more, paste the hex into the hexadecimal box here, then press "convert":

http://www.asciitohex.com/
posted by blue t-shirt at 2:41 PM on February 12, 2014 [2 favorites]

More info: RTF is Rich Text format, not an image format at all.
posted by blue t-shirt at 2:41 PM on February 12, 2014

Response by poster: That was amazingly quick - so not an image.

Brilliant - can't thank you enough
posted by handybitesize at 2:44 PM on February 12, 2014