Anyone know of a trick or shortcut that would be handy to convert this? Ive googled, but our websense and download policy won't allow me to download any free software to do it for me.

I appreciate any help!

7/27/2006 9:55:42 AM

notepad

7/27/2006 9:57:21 AM

".dat" means nothing. It's probably just a plain text file, in which case you can simply change the extension from .dat to .txt and be done with it.

.doc is for MS Word, and is not a text format. if you want it in a Word document, you'll have to open it in Notepad or something, then copy/paste into Word.
Or just open Word and go to Open, select "show all files", then open the .dat or .txt directly.

7/27/2006 10:09:15 AM

7/27/2006 10:15:30 AM

you must not understand what you really want to do

7/27/2006 10:44:31 AM

Odds are you will not be able to get any significant amount of readable data out of the file. ".dat" is used to signify that information was stored in a non-specific format. In other words, you aren't going to be able to read the information because nothing you have knows how to interpret how the data is arranged/stored. Now, you can stream text into a .dat so that its basically a .txt with a different extension but odds are the program that created it didn't do that.

If you have an idea of what the data stored is supposed to be then you can open it in a hex editor and parse it bit by bit but it takes forever and the chances of you getting it correct are slim. An example of this was when I was trying to retrieve data out of an old file version (no longer supported) for some surveying software we wrote in-house. I knew pretty much what kind of data was stored and how it would be chunked up so I knew I would come across specific data types in a sequence (double, double, null terminated string, int) so I had a good idea of where one chunk of relevant data started and where it ended.

[Edited on July 27, 2006 at 12:42 PM. Reason : .]

7/27/2006 12:39:33 PM

in most of my dealings with .dat files, they are ASCII (text) files, so changing it to .txt would be no problem. That's just anecdotal evidence though - has nothing to do with what your .dat files actually are.
but it's completely dependant on how the .dat files were generated. If they are ASCII based files, then you're good to go. but as msb said, if they are binary files generated by some program, then too bad.

7/27/2006 1:20:44 PM

All the .dat files I've ever dealt with open in any text editor with no problem. Lists of data from experiments that have been formatted for use in Tecplot (plotting software). In those, changing the extension would be no problem whatsoever.

But if it's like ^^ described, then I suppose Notepad wouldn't be the solution.

7/27/2006 6:30:37 PM

Every program I've ever written that stores any data it would have to input later, I save in a ".dat" file. Usually I put all the information it needs in the same file. It would start with a header containing an index of the contents.

The .dat extension just signifies that it's a non-standard input format.

7/28/2006 3:48:23 PM