[R] Binary Value into Text

[Jeff Newmiller]

Please post in plain text format. Only you have the power to format your 
email the way we will see it... using the default HTML format only leads 
to odd wraparounds and weird characters that you don't know about when you 
send but we have to wade through when we recieve it.

"Character" data is rather more complex now than it used to be in days of 
yore... what with Unicode UTF16 and UTF-8 and so on. You are getting into 
deep water trying to mix binary and text data. (I know enough to know I am 
no expert in this topic.) I highly recommend reading the article by Paul 
Murrell on reading binary data [1], but even that is unlikely to answer 
all the headaches you are diving into and it will probably stop being "on 
topic" for this list pretty quickly.

One key point is that you should read "raw" data, not "character" data 
when getting data out of files, even if they are opened in "binary mode".

[1] Viewing binary files with the hexview package. R News, 7(1):2--8, 
April 2007.

On Mon, 13 Jun 2016, Fahman Khan via R-help wrote:

> I have written a following piece of code. 
>> binaryFile <- file("sampleBinary.dat", 'rb')>readBin(binaryFile, character(), endian="little")
>
> I'm getting a warning message that says 
>
> Warning message: In readBin(binaryFile, chracter(), endian="little") : incomplete string at end of file has been discarded
>
> I did research on this topic but was still unable to solve.
>
> My file contains the following binary values: 01101000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111 00001010 which is hello in text. I just want to convert this into text. 
>
> Any help would be appreciated.
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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