How would I do this. (Working with Binary

[Matom3]

If someone could tell me how to solve my problem that would be great. Thanks!!!

 

I am working on a project (which I would not and cant disclose information about).

I have a PDF as well as ACII which has the raw binary expressed in bits "0 and 1". How could I translate that file back to text efficiently?

The reason why I say efficiently is because the ACII file is 22600 pages long full of binary code expressed in bits

 

I am running OSX El Capitan

 

Thanks you to all that can help

[burnttoastnice]

Are you trying to extract the text from a PDF file? I think you'd probably need to know the structure of the PDF file itself to figure out how to extract text from it.

 

For example, a Word document is actually a .zip file renamed to .docx - the .xml file containing the document can be easily extracted

[Matom3]

1 minute ago, burnttoastnice said:

Are you trying to extract the text from a PDF file? I think you'd probably need to know the structure of the PDF file itself to figure out how to extract text from it.

 

For example, for a Word document is actually a .zip file renamed to .docx - the .xml file containing the document can be easily extracted

Nah. I converted it into a plain text file to make it easier to work with.

[burnttoastnice]

5 minutes ago, Matom3 said:

Nah. I converted it into a plain text file to make it easier to work with.

Oh. If I was converting binary back to ascii text I'd probably look up a character code table, and make a small program to convert each binary byte to an ascii character.

[trag1c]

1 hour ago, burnttoastnice said:

Oh. If I was converting binary back to ascii text I'd probably look up a character code table, and make a small program to convert each binary byte to an ascii character.

No lookup table is needed. Binary makes no difference when reading text, assuming there is no multibyte characters then simply reading a single binary byte into a char is as simple as reading it as if it were text.

 

You can try this for your self with this C++ snippet. This snippet writes a single binary byte into a text file which is binary representation of the ascii character '<'  to the file which is then read back into a char which equates to the same character.

	std::fstream f("file.txt", std::ios::binary | std::ios::out);
	char a = 0b00111100;
	f.write(&a, sizeof(1));
	f.close();

	f.open("file.txt", std::ios::binary | std::ios::in);
	char b;
	f.read(&b, sizeof(1));
	f.close();

 

[Matom3]

31 minutes ago, trag1c said:

No lookup table is needed. Binary makes no difference when reading text, assuming there is no multibyte characters then simply reading a single binary byte into a char is as simple as reading it as if it were text.

 

You can try this for your self with this C++ snippet. This snippet writes a single binary byte into a text file which is binary representation of the ascii character '<'  to the file which is then read back into a char which equates to the same character.

	std::fstream f("file.txt", std::ios::binary | std::ios::out);
	char a = 0b00111100;
	f.write(&a, sizeof(1));
	f.close();

	f.open("file.txt", std::ios::binary | std::ios::in);
	char b;
	f.read(&b, sizeof(1));
	f.close();

 

Thank you very much for supplying me with this.

However I am having trouble running your script. I must be doing something wrong. How would you run the script?

Thanks

[trag1c]

7 hours ago, Matom3 said:

Thank you very much for supplying me with this.

However I am having trouble running your script. I must be doing something wrong. How would you run the script?

Thanks

Its not a script. Its executable C++ code so you would need a C++ compiler. Its also incomplete as it requires a function name, parameters, as well {} around the snippet. You would also need a main function.

 

Also in its current state its not exactly useful as it only reads 1 byte of data. It was more for demonstation purposes on how to process text stored in a binary file through programming. It would be very simple to expand to process and transcode any file from binary to text or vice versa. The idea is the same regardless of programming language.