FTP problem: Someone did ASCII instead of Binary, Any way to recover it?

[The Dancing Peacock]

Someone at work FTP'ed a clip at work in ASCII mode, instead of Binary? Is there any sort of tool that can convert it, or a way to do manual find and replace for line feed and new line character codes?

or are we just SOL?

 

[TheDiggler]

You're likely SOL. If the sending OS/PLATFORM is different than the RECEIVING OS/PLATFORM, then you're definitely SOL. Can you get the person to re-FTP the data in BINARY mode?

 

[notfred]

if you sent the file from a windows box, to a unix box, it'll translate the newline characters from \r\n (windows format) to simply \n (unix format). You can't just replace all the \n's with \r\n, though, as any \n characters in the original file will be translated to \r\n, even if that's not how they originally were.

However, if it was the other way around, you should be able to replace \r\n with \n and it might work.

Also, mac systems use \r as the newline character, so you may be able to use that.

BTW, this is all theoretical, I've never actually tried it.

\n = 00001010 (binary)
\r = 00001101 (binary)

That may work. Might be an interesting experiment, anyway.

 

[Heisenberg]

I used to use uncook95 to fix mp3 files that had the same problem. I don't know if it'll work on anything besides mp3's, but you could try it.