How to extract ASCII data from a binary file in an unknown format in Windows?

Question

On Windows, is there a better way to convert a binary file where the internal structure is unknown, less than the fact that its contents are ASCII in nature back to plain text?

Ideally, conversion would create a “human” version. I think the file should contain something like the following:

Date: 10 FEB 2010
House: 345 Dogwood Drive
Exterior: Brick

Answer 1

On Linux / Unix:

$ strings < unknown.dat > ascii-from-unknown.txt

This, of course, is not so much a "conversion" as direct extraction, just the rejection of bytes other than ASCII. This is useful quite often.

In general, without knowing the internal file format, I don’t think you can do much better.

Answer 2

, , hex dump : ASCII-, ( ).

, , , , .

, Windows.