Hi Kirk, Thanks for that, I will give it a whirl, its sort of a side project which I am working on so I haven't chance to try out your ideas yet.
Andy On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 8:01 PM, Kirk Kerekes <kirkkere...@gmail.com> wrote: > Open the file in a hex editor (0xED, for example), if it has the text > "plist" near the beginning, it may have been archived with NSKeyedArchiver. > If instead it displays 0x3 or 0x4 followed by 0xb followed by "typedstream" > or "streamtyped" at the beginning of the file, it was probably archived with > NSArchiver. > > In either case, examining the file should give you some clues as to the > class contents. > > If they are all stock NSClasses, just use the appropriate unarchiver > class's methods. > > If the root is a custom class, you are sort of toast unless you can Google > the class -- and even then you may be going down a wrong path. > > You could write an app that would let you select subtrees of the archive > and decode them perhaps. Sounds like an interesting project. > > Or you could subclass the appropriate archiver class and add some error > handling/exception handling so that it could proceed as best it could when > encountering unknown classes. Might need to swizzle in a subclass of NSCoder > also. > > You could substitute an NSMutableDictionary instance for unknown classes > NSArchiver finds and dynamically create entries in the dictionary for any > decodable items. > > It isn't going to be drop-dead easy -- and there is always the possibility > (however unlikely) that the originator of the file had subclassed NSCoder > itself to do something custom. > > Could be an interesting tool, if you can make it even half work. Might find > a market in forensic computing and related areas. > > If you are just looking for text, it may be staring at you in the hex > editor. > > > > I am trying to decode a Yahoo chat file which has been encoded using > > NSArchiver. The problem is I don't have the definition of the class it > has > > encoded and I want to be able to decode it to view the chat conversation. > > Any ideas on how I go about working out the definition to decode the > file? > _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
