How can I convert .000 and .002 files into files that I can understand and work with MATLAB

Hello everyone,

I'm a studient of Marine Science and I'm new with programming and working with different types of files.

I have pressure and wave data from loggers. The files I've got, have the extension .000 and .002.

For example:

21033018.000

21033018.002

21033020.000

21033020.002

21033022.000

21033022.002

...

When I open those files with Notepad++, Excel or other softwares the content is unredable, that is, the written content is in an incomprehensible "language" with symbols.

I want to know how can I get the readable data. Data that I can read and understand with numbers, so I can work with toolboxes for MATLAB. How can I convert those files in files like .csv or .txt that have the understandable data.

Thanks in advance for your attention,

Guillermo

[Walter Roberson]

21033018.000

I suspect the breakdown of that file name is year 2021, month 03, day 30, hour 18.

Unfortunately that does not give me any information about what the file formats are, and they are not necessarily the same formats for 000 versus 002.

What devices and software is being used to create the files ?

[Atsushi Ueno]

I guess it is a binary file that usual loggers output in order to make it as small as possible.

• If you open the log file with a binary editor, you may be able to determine which part of the data you need.
• You might be able to check the logger specifications to find out what the output format is.

[Stephen23]

Do the file extensions form a contiguous sequence of numbers, e.g. .000, .001, .002 ?

Are the files reasonably large?

If both answer "yes", then you might have archived/compressed data which has been split into multiple files. Several file compression tools/formats support this. If using Windows try 7-zip to extract the original data.

If "no", please open one of the files using a text editor and make a screenshot of the first twenty or so characters, and paste it here in a new comment.

[Atsushi Ueno]

I vote for @Stephen23's comment. Yes, they are 7-zip split files.

[Walter Roberson]

If you could execute this and show us the result, it might help us identify the file

fid = fopen('21033018.000', 'r');
f64 = fread(fid, [1 64], '*uint8');
fclose(fid);

fprintf('header as character:\n');
fprintf('%c', f64);
fprintf('\n');

fprintf('\nheader as decimal:\n');
fprintf('%03d ', f64);
fprintf('\n');

fprintf('\nheader as hex:\n');
fprintf('%02x ', f64);
fprintf('\n');

[Sri Adiyanti]

Hi, Iif they are raw binary file from RD ADCP data, try: GitHub - Cody-Benton/ADCP_Processing: Code processes binary ADCP data and incorporates some quality control measures.

Answer 1

[Gagan Agarwal]

Hi Guillermo Carballo Lafuente

You can refer to the sample code snippet below to convert the files into a format that is compatible with MATLAB, allowing you to work with them within the MATLAB environment.

files = dir('*.002'); 
% Loop through each file 
for id = 1:length(files) 
    % Get the file name (minus the extension) 
    orig_name = files(id).name; 
    [~, basename, ext] = fileparts(orig_name); 
    new_name = [basename '_', ext(2:end) '.txt']; 
    movefile(orig_name, new_name); 
end 

The above code snippet converts files with the extension '.002' to '.m' files. Similarly, you can convert files with the extension '.000' and ‘.002’ to any desired format by modifying the 'new_name' variable in the code.

[Walter Roberson]

This will not help. @Guillermo Carballo Lafuente tried opening them with a text editor and found them to be unreadable to humans, which indicates that they are binary files. Renaming binary files does not make them any more usable to MATLAB.