null chars in text file: recover text?

  • From: "Alex Hall" <mehgcap@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "Blind Programming List" <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:21:59 -0400

Hi all,
Someone on another list sent me a text file, saying that much of the text is gone but the file size is still the same. This file has been periodically overwritten (a new copy written over the old one as the file was backed up), and one day the file's text ended at a random spot and all text after that spot was erased. I looked at the file in a perl script that gave me the first character that was not ascii 0 (what I think is a null character) and the first characters that were not null were the end of the text in the file, not surprisingly. This tells me that all text after some point was, for some reason, replaced by null characters. Is there any hope of recovering the text now? I hope this made sense. 


Have a great day,
Alex
New email address: mehgcap@xxxxxxxxx 
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