users.dat Encoding format

[Anonymous]

Does anyone happen to know what the encoding format is for the users.dat file in the workshared project backup folder? I would like to use it to get a list of everyone who has worked on the project.  I can open it in notepad and see the list.  There is weird formatting.  Opening it in Code Writter has better formatting, but there is no spaces between users entries.

Thanks

[jeremytammik]

Dear Michael,

Thank you for your query.

I cannot tell off-hand.

Can yu attach a sample file to explore, or would that divulge confidential info?

Best regards,

Jeremy

[Anonymous]

I have attached the file, as well as screen shots from Code Writter and Notepad

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

I finally got back to this, and it is a string of escape characters. Sometimes the Users.dat file begins with "\f" sometimes "\r". There is always the null character "\0" in between every character. In between each user entry is a control character. Sometime it is "ACK" sometimes Device Control 1-4.

So it looks like the easiest way to get the user list is to parse out the special ascii characters and look for null and a control character next to each other as a break in between users.

[jeremytammik]

Have you tried to interpret this simply as a Unicode text file?

Here are my results opening it in a text editor on the Mac:

 

It looks like this in Visual Studio using automatic text encoding:

 

Cheers,

Jeremy

[jeremytammik]

Dear Michael,

Here is another suggestion:

https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/#unicode-dammit

It is pointed at (along with many others) in the discussion on determining the encoding of text in Python:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/436220/determine-the-encoding-of-text-in-python

I found that searching the Internet for 'python determine text encoding':

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=python+determine+text+encoding

... Later...

The encoding is indeed a bit hard to nail down.

I installed the Python charset project, which also installs a `chardetect` utility.

https://pypi.org/project/chardet

Running chardetect on users.dat simply reports:

$ chardetect users.dat
users.dat: ascii with confidence 1.0

Unfortunately, that is no big help.

Ah well, you seem to have it under control, anyway.

Cheers,

Jeremy