Question

I’m currently parsing what looks to be a proprietary file format from a third-party commercial application. They seem to use a funny character encoding system and I need some help determining what it is, assuming it’s not a proprietary encoding system as well.

I don’t have a whole lot of different characters to analyze from but here is what I have so far:

__b -> blank space
__f -> forward slash

So for example, “Hello World” become “Hello__bWorld”.

Does anybody have any idea what this is?

If not do you know of a resource on the web that can help me? Maybe there is a tool out there than can help in identifying character encoding?

Answer 1

It seems to be a proprietary encoding used by Numara FootPrints. This list of mappings comes from the FootPrints User Group forum. There is also a Perl script for decoding it.

Code Character
__b   (space)
__a ' (single quote)
__q " (double quote)
__t ` (backquote)
__m @ (at-sign)
__d . (period)
__u - (hyphen-minus)
__s ;
__c :
__p )
__P (
__3 #
__4 $
__5 %
__6 ^
__7 &
__8 *
__0 ~ (tilde)
__f / (slash)
__F \ (backslash)
__Q ?
__e ]
__E [
__g >
__G <
__B !
__W {
__w }
__C =
__A +
__I | (vertical line)
__M , (comma)
__Ux_ Unicode character with value 'x'