Changing a text file to a windows file

cold_filter

Hi, does anyone know how to change file in notepad into a windows file??

rick_fantastic

what type of windows file would you like to change it to? dll?

go to folder options and select the show file extension and then when you can see the file extension you can rename it...

cold_filter

Cant do that, its a work laptop, and has restrictions on it, i want to change it to a binary file.

seamus

open a command prompt

rename myfile.txt myfile.dll

If it's not actually a binary file though, this is useless. You'd need to compile it first.

DonkeyStyle \o/

Could you be a bit more specific?

Short answer: Neeever gonna happen with notepad, sorry.

Long answer: If the text file contains plain-text, human-readable source code, you'll want to run it through a compiler for that language.
Or if you're directly editing an existing binary, I'd abort notepad completely and get a hex editor (though a locked-down laptop may well prevent you from installing one).
Failing that and relying on things that are already installed, the built in msdos editor has an "open binary" mode that'll preserve the file so long as you don't make a complete balls of it... or maybe debug if you're feeling crazy. :eek:

Really not sure what you're trying to achieve... but I think it's a case of - if you don't already know how to do it, it's probably not going to work anyway.
<<shrugg>>

cold_filter

Cheers for your help guys, what im trying to do is,i decode a binary file to txt format, what i want to do is to encode it back to binary, its baffling me as to how to do this successfully!

cold_filter

Cheers for your help guys, what im trying to do is,i decode a binary file to txt format, what i want to do is to encode it back to binary, its baffling me as to how to do this successfully!

Krusty_Clown

It's baffling me too... What exactly are you tring to do?

What is the binary file? Is this a software localization question?
Are you talking about taking a resource file, (like a Win32 DLL which contains resources (string tables, dialogs, icons, menus, etc) and using some kind of resource editor (e.g. Visual Studio) to save it out as a Resource File (RC file)?

Or are you talking about a binary file as in a Microsoft Word document, which you've converted to a text file and need to convert it back? In this case, you could select all of the text in Notepad and copy and paste it into a new document in Microsoft Word (or whichever your intented target application is).

More info!

DonkeyStyle \o/

Yeah tbh, I'm not sure this process is reversable... I suspect data is being lost in translation.
Opening a binary file in notepad doesn't so much as convert it to text... try to think of it more as interpreting it as text to the best of its ability.
I'm not 100% sure if data is destroyed because notepad can't represent the contents of the file accurately or whether it's just adding extra junk when you save it... I'd suspect a bit of both, but either way I'd give up on notepad for direct editing.

There may be more simple alternatives to your whole approach, but it's impossible to suggest anything since we don't know what you're doing.

The long and short of it is - avoid reading binary files as text to begin with.

Capt'n Midnight

Have you renamed the extension from .txt to whatever ?

Are extensions visible ?

That "Hide extensions for known file types" seems designed to allow phishing/trojans - a better option would have required the user to rename the extension separately.