The unix utility file is great for generally identifying file types.

But as for your description of the "fixed width" file format: I just don't understand it, and the part that you showed in the example doesn't look very fixed width to me.

Maybe you could show us a few samples of that file? (Real samples, where you can see patterns)

There's a nice trick to determine if something is fixed-width with delimiters: take a long string that consists of the delimiting character, and binary-AND it with many records. If the delimiting character is still there at some places, that is very likely a delimiter within a fixed-width record.

(But since I don't understand your file format I can't say if that trick is applicable here).

In reply to Re: how to identify a fixed width file by moritz
in thread how to identify a fixed width file by ftumsh

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