Question

I have a minecraft server, and need to backup all the items people have, I hope to do this by editing the .dat files in world/players. In this file, there are .dat files and their names are the usernames of each player. when I open it with Notepad++, it shows me gibberish like this:

Regular Notepad gives me this:

‹       ãb``bà
ÎIM-ÉÌM-b`àd`óÍ/ÉÌÏcc```¶ÛqæÀÉEÚ“öob=Ô£i×ý‰Ù5S  #‡ž{Q~i^
#‡GiQ   H?È46ÔÄœ’Œÿÿ™8]€byÅ@Àf¥˜3‹u88=óÊRóJò‹*AœÌùÅ`û˜Û„¥<^$çà ’apˆßñM&ðБŽ%%    ‰ÉÙ[€ÖƒÝœ™—4–Å-³(õÿV·Äœ—Ìâ’ļäTˆÉAù%‰ ï°‚\pð²±’ïÌ9L@§¥&–d€M“d  íl+  

I heard the file is Gzipped. Is this why it is like this? How can I decode this so I can actually read it. I need to decrypt this from a PHP script.

Answer 1

You need to find out what compression it is really but try and open the file with this (gzip):

<?php
$fp = fopen('compress.zlib://yourfile.dat', 'r');
if( $fp ){
    while(!feof($fp) ){
        echo fread($fp, 2048);
    }
    fclose($fp);
}
?> 

Check out http://www.php.net/manual/en/wrappers.compression.php for more info.

EDIT:
You may want to try this:

<?php
$dat = file_get_contents('yourfile.dat');
echo gzdecoder($dat);

function gzdecoder($d){
    $f=ord(substr($d,3,1));
    $h=10;$e=0;
    if($f&4){
        $e=unpack('v',substr($d,10,2));
        $e=$e[1];$h+=2+$e;
    }
    if($f&8){
        $h=strpos($d,chr(0),$h)+1;
    }
    if($f&16){
        $h=strpos($d,chr(0),$h)+1;
    }
    if($f&2){
        $h+=2;
    }
    $u = gzinflate(substr($d,$h));
    if($u===FALSE){
        $u=$d;
    }
    return $u;
}
?>

Also its not encrypted, its compressed. 😉