On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 11:11 AM, Alan Gauld <alan.ga...@btinternet.com>wrote:
>
>> {\rtf1\mac\ansicpg10000\cocoartf824\cocoasubrtf440
>>
>
> The problem is that this is an RTF format which is a binary format.
> You can process binary data ion Python (see the box on the files
> topic page) but it is much more difficult that normal plain text files.
>
I'd like to correct a misapprehension here: RTF files are not a "binary
format" in the usual sense of that phrase - there are no non-ASCII
characters, newlines are handled normally, etc. They're text files, but
with lots of funky formatting codes included - which are themselves all
text. They're a lot like badly-formatted, insanely complicated XML,
actually.
They're full of gibberish-looking strings like the above, and the nesting of
curly braces can run to dozens of layers deep - however, if you want to get
a quick idea of what's going on in an RTF, the fastest way is to unfold it
(search-and-replace each "{" and "}" with "{\n" and "}\n" respectively) and
indent each opened curly brace. Then if you want to give yourself a
headache, you can sit down with Microsoft's RTF specification and figure out
what all those codes do.
--
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