I'm looking to identify some possible software options that will allow for custom rules to manipulate bulk data files (.csv) For example, proper capitalization (allowing for states to remain capital and unique surnames), identifying the word count of specific words in a field, and some other custom rules. Any guidance would be appreciated.
You could use Talend Open Studio for this task. It is an Opensource ETL tool for data manipulation and integration. You can for example ImportCSV >> DATABASE >> perform transformations >> ExportCSV. The possibilities are endless.
You can find it here: http://www.talend.com/products-data-integration/talend-open-studio.php
It also sounds like you might be looking to create a profile of the data. For this you can use Talend Open Profiler, they recently added support for flat files such as your .csv. It is simple to use and you should be up and running in 30 mins.
You can find the download here: http://www.talend.com/products-data-quality/talend-open-profiler.php
You can find some tutorials here:http://www.talendforge.org/tutorials/menu.php
On the tutorials choose the Data Quality tab, and scroll down until 'Talend Open Profiler'
It is my first step in assessing data quality on a new dataset.
A quick google "data scrubbing utilities" turned up this:
http://data-scrubbing.qarchive.org/
They look to be very close to what you're looking for.
It'll really depend on how complex the rules get. Much more complex than simple stuff, and you'd probably be ahead by just coding something up (or having it coded).
(The story is relevant...mostly)
So I'm over at my buddy's house playing some RE5 Gold Edition, beat the game, unlock a bunch of stuff, and then I copy the save file to my memory stick so I can take it home with me.
Of course, the save is locked to his profile so I can't play it on my PS3, even though I was there beating everything with him. Lame.
So, I've got this save file sitting on my memory stick, I want to see if I can hack it to work with my profile.
I figure if I just create 2 new saves on different profiles and do nothing else, they should be identical except for the profile information. Then I just have to replace my friend's profile info with mine, and it should work, right?
So I need a tool for diff-ing these 2 binary files so I can quickly locate the parts of the file that are different. I know there are plenty of tools for text, but what about for binary?
(Actually, there are 3 files, DATA0.DAT, PARAM.PFD, and PARAM.SFO... not sure if anyone knows anything about PS3 save files, specifically for Resident Evil 5 Gold)
Don't think it's going to be possible. Apparently the save file is "protected". All it would take to prevent me from tampering with it is if they hash the contents of the data using some unknown algorithm, and then verify the hash matches up upon load. Not sure if they're doing that, but... guess it would be kind of dumb if they weren't doing something similar.
Hex Workshop is one of the premier hex manipulation applications and it has a file compare function.
But be aware that the game may not use a straight foward data saving mechanism, you may be dealing with a custom database structure, or the data may be encrypted. Game developers typically don't make it easy to hack save files, for obvious reasons...
I thought most of compare tools can do that (like Beyond Compare which I love). For example, there is FC.exe in Windows 7 in System folder. Compares ASCII and binaries. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/159214 for some details.
check out hex workshop. most other hex editors out there should have this feature as well.
Any ideas ?
I think the original source was a goldmine database, looking around it appears that the file was likely built using an application called ACT which I gather is a huge product I don't really want to be deploying for a one off file total size less than 5 meg.
So ...
Anyone know of a simple tool that I can run this file through to convert it to a standard CSV or something?
It does appear to be (when looking at it in notepad and excel) in some sort of csv type format but it's like the data is encrypted somehow.
Ok this is weird,
I got a little confused because the data looked a complete mess, in actual fact the mess was the data, that's what it was meant to look like.
Simply put, i opened the file in notepad, seemed to have a sort of pattern so i droppped it on excel.
Apparently excel has no issues reading these files ... strange huh !!!
I am unaware of any third party tooling for opening these files specifically, although there is an SDK available for C# which could resolve your problem with a little elbow grease.
The SDK can be aquired for free Here
Also there is a developer forum which could provide some valuable resources including training material with sample code Here
Resources will be provided with the SDK
Also, out of interest since ACT is a Sage product have you any Sage software floating about which you could attempt to access the data with? Most offices have!
Failing all of the above there is a trial available for ACT! Here!
Good luck with your problem!
I am working of a file preparation software to enable translators work easily and efficiently on a wide range of file formats.
As far as text-based formats (xml, php, resource files,...) are concerned, my small preparation utility works fine, but a major problem for most translators is to handle all kinds of proprietary binary formats (Framemaker, Publisher, Quark...).
These files are rarely requested and need to be opened in expensive applications (few freelance can afford to buy $20,000 worth of software just to handle a few projects per year), and even then it is not convenient to work directly in those applications anyway.
I would like to be able to read these files and extract the text in such a way that it can be translated and then re-imported in the original application with minimal effort, or even better, to recreate a valid native binary file.
Does that sound doable?
Where can I find more information on handling binary file formats and are there useful tools for these kind of jobs (besides regular hex editors)?
Thanks in advance.
Of course reverse engineering is possible, but without format specs it will take a lot of work. I would look at the return on effort regarding supporting these 'rarely requested, very expensive' formats. You may be better off spending that effort improving the core functionality of your app.
Another angle is to contact the companies with these formats, explain your goal, explain that it helps their product, and if they don't see you as competition they might be willing to help.
I know that you want to reverse engineer them - but since these may be propriety file formats you are looking at a very steep curve trying to decode them...
Some (as I have written some propritety formats for interal use before) have specific methods and objects written into them that serve some alternative process than the file contents themselves. Stuff that would prove the new file is illegal.
Just my 2 cents and I am no lawyer =>
Maybe you could pick a cheaper application which has import features for QuarkXPress. For example InDesign should be able to read Quark documents. Then use the importing application to export to whatever format you need - maybe with a help of plug-in.
What tools are available to aid in decoding unknown binary data formats?
I know Hex Workshop and 010 Editor both support structures. These are okay to a limited extent for a known fixed format but get difficult to use with anything more complicated, especially for unknown formats. I guess I'm looking at a module for a scripting language or a scriptable GUI tool.
For example, I'd like to be able to find a structure within a block of data from limited known information, perhaps a magic number. Once I've found a structure, then follow known length and offset words to find other structures. Then repeat this recursively and iteratively where it makes sense.
In my dreams, perhaps even automatically identify possible offsets and lengths based on what I've already told the system!
Here are some tips that come to mind:
From my experience, interactive scripting languages (I use Python) can be a great help. You can write a simple framework to deal with binary streams and some simple algorithms. Then you can write scripts that will take your binary and check various things. For example:
Do some statistical analysis on various parts. Random data, for example, will tell you that this part is probably compressed/encrypted. Zeros may mean padding between parts. Scattered zeros may mean integer values or Unicode strings and so on. Try to spot various offsets. Try to convert parts of the binary into 2 or 4 byte integers or into floats, print them and see if they make sence. Write some functions that will search for repeating or very similar parts in the data, this way you can easily spot headers.
Try to find as many strings as possible, try different encodings (c strings, pascal strings, utf8/16, etc.). There are some good tools for that (I think that Hex Workshop has such a tool). Strings can tell you a lot.
Good luck!
For Mac OS X, there's a great tool that's even better than my iBored: Synalyze It!
(http://www.synalysis.net/)
Compared to iBored, it is better suited for non-blocked files, while also giving full control over structures, including scriptability (with Lua). And it visualizes structures better, too.
Tupni; to my knowledge not directly available out of Microsoft Research, but there is a paper about this tool which can be of interest to someone wanting to write a similar program (perhaps open source):
Tupni: Automatic Reverse Engineering of Input Formats (# ACM digital library)
Abstract
Recent work has established the importance of automatic reverse
engineering of protocol or file format specifications. However, the
formats reverse engineered by previous tools have missed important
information that is critical for security applications. In this
paper, we present Tupni, a tool that can reverse engineer an input
format with a rich set of information, including record sequences,
record types, and input constraints. Tupni can generalize the format
specification over multiple inputs. We have implemented a
prototype of Tupni and evaluated it on 10 different formats: five
file formats (WMF, BMP, JPG, PNG and TIF) and five network
protocols (DNS, RPC, TFTP, HTTP and FTP). Tupni identified all
record sequences in the test inputs. We also show that, by aggregating
over multiple WMF files, Tupni can derive a more complete
format specification for WMF. Furthermore, we demonstrate the
utility of Tupni by using the rich information it provides for zeroday
vulnerability signature generation, which was not possible with
previous reverse engineering tools.
My own tool "iBored", which I released just recently, can do parts of this. I wrote the tool to visualize and debug file system formats (UDF, HFS, ISO9660, FAT etc.), and implemented search, copy and later even structure and templates support. The structure support is pretty straight-forward, and the templates are a way to identify structures dynamically.
The entire thing is programmable in a Visual BASIC dialect, allowing you to test values, read specific blocks, and all.
The tool is free, works on all platforms (Win, Mac, Linux), but as it's personal tool which I just released to the public to share it, it's not much documented.
However, if you want to give it a try, and like to give feedback, I might add more useful features.
I'd even open source it, but as it's written in REALbasic, I doubt many people will join such a project.
Link: iBored home page
I still occasionally use an old hex editor called A.X.E., Advanced Hex Editor. It seems to have largely disappeared from the Internet now, though Google should still be able to find it for you. The last version I know of was version 3.4, but I've really only used the free-for-personal-use version 2.1.
Its most interesting feature, and the one I've had the most use for deciphering various game and graphics formats, is its graphical view mode. That basically just shows you the file with each byte turned into a color-coded pixel. And as simple as that sounds, it has made my reverse-engineering attempts a lot easier at times.
I suppose doing it by eye is quite the opposite of doing automatic analysis, though, and the graphical mode won't be much use for finding and following offsets...
The later version has some features that sound like they could fit your needs (scripts, regularity finder, grammar generator), but I have no idea how good they are.
There is Hachoir which is a Python library for parsing any binary format into fields, and then browse the fields. It has lots of parsers for common formats, but you can also write own parsers for your files (eg. when working with code that reads or writes binary files, I usually write a Hachoir parser first to have a debugging aid). Looks like the project is pretty much inactive by now, though.
Kaitai is an open-source language for describing binary structures in data streams. It comes with a translator that can output parsing code for many programming languages, for inclusion in your own program code.
My project icebuddha.com supports this using python to describe the format in the browser.
A cut'n'paste of my answer to a similar question:
One tool is WinOLS, which is designed for interpreting and editing vehicle engine managment computer binary images (mostly the numeric data in their lookup tables). It has support for various endian formats (though not PDP, I think) and viewing data at various widths and offsets, defining array areas (maps) and visualising them in 2D or 3D with all kinds of scaling and offset options. It also has a heuristic/statistical automatic map finder, which might work for you.
It's a commercial tool, but the free demo will let you do everything but save changes to the binary and use engine management features you don't need.