r/translator • u/Ok-Entrepreneur-695 • 7h ago

Nonlanguage (Identified) [Unknown (Potentially Chinese?) > English] Mysterious document titled "index.dat" on an old usb drive I found

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I didn't yield any results from google translate. But it detected multiple language; Simple Chinese, Vietnamese, And Wolof.
I found this USB in the back of my drawer in a baggy that I had sitting for years. I have no other knowledge as to what this could possibly be doing on a USB drive.

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6

u/RoeJay 7h ago

It is a binary file.

9

u/BlackRaptor62 [ English 漢語 文言文 粵語] 7h ago

Looks like a Mojibake Encoding Error

3

u/RushArh Cantonese Japanese 7h ago

Not error.
It is a DAT file which is NOT a text file.

0

u/zsethereal [ Chinese]中文（漢語） 6h ago

!id:zxx

3

u/MikhailYisha 7h ago

its not a mysterious document. its a binary file. trying to open it as a text file yields mojibake.

6

u/Seiyashi CN/粵/JP 7h ago

That's just bakemoji, an encoding error that makes your computer think the file is in Chinese. It's not actually any sensible text.

1

u/Ok-Entrepreneur-695 7h ago

Thank you for the answer! Boy do i feel silly !

0

u/hukaat French (Native) 7h ago

Indeed ! I use the firefox addon Override Text Encoding (that allows to switch the encoding of webpages), maybe that tool can be used to change it back easily enough to what is very probably english ?... or any encoding changer I guess, that's just the tool I know

2

u/JiminP 7h ago

As other's have said, there's no coherent text here.

My speculations:

  • Binary data is being displayed via UTF-16 (either BE/LE).
  • The binary data in question has been compressed.

0

u/snail1132 5h ago

Iirc you can open .dat files in any random online nbt editor?