Every so often, if I open a non-text based document in either Microsoft Word or Notepad, it will open a massive file with an endless wall of completely garbled, gibberish text, most of the characters being either rectangle boxes or characters that can’t normally be typed. What does each of these characters represent? What happens if I insert or delete these characters?
Usually files would refuse to open with an incompatible format. How do these text-processing softwares somehow manage to run virtually any file?
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>What does each of these characters represent?
Not necessarily anything specific, the meaningful chunks in the underlying data may not align with single characters.
Notepad just assumes whatever the file is is going to make sense if decoded with an ASCII table.
Lets say the byte has a value of 42(in hexadecimal this would be represented as 2A). Notepad is going to interpret that as the character *. If what you’re looking at was a computer program, that might actually be the opcode for subtract.
>What happens if I insert or delete these characters?
You’ll likely break whatever it was you changed. It depends on what it actually did, and how your change will be interpreted. If you want to see what the data of a computer program actually means, open it with a disassembler.
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