I'm always trying to improve my own newsreading situation, which is
probably a common denominator in an established newsgroup. Unhappy with
the amount of SPAM I was seeing, I found my way to news.software.readers,
where I was enticed not only to fire OE in favor of Dialog, but I've
switched newsservers as well. news.individual.net has taken all the tennis
shoes, cheap flights to london and lolita porn out of it for me.

Dialog is much-more hands-on than OE. It stores messages in a database
with the filename .mbx . I believe this is called mbox the way that .jpg
is called jpeg. We, the Dialog users in n.s.r., are trying to export the
messages in this database. To this end we have a ruby script, the most
relevant portion of which is MsgFile.rb:

Ron Ford wrote:

...Ruby code elided...

I know absolutely nothing of Ruby or .mbx formats, either, but I see no
reason why Fortran couldn't access them.

I'd think there would be any number of suitable APIs already extant for
most anything anyone would want to do with .mbx files that could simply
be linked to, however, rather than beginning from scratch...

--

On Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:43:55 -0500, dpb posted:

Ron Ford wrote:

<<--CUT-->>

Most hex-editors and binary file viewers show a three part display (you may need to unwrap the following line):

00000154 2F 6C 69 62 2F 6C 64 2D 6C 69 6E 75 78 2E 73 6F 2E 32 00 00 /lib/ld-linux.so.2..

Pos.in.file 16 bytes displayed as hex same bytes as chars

In the third panel above, those bytes that are not normal viewable characters are shown with dots, but you can still see what those are in the middle panel. It helps to know the Ascii char-set.

-- mecej4 (mecej4_at_operamail.com)

On Wed, 11 Jun 2008 08:34:23 -0500, mecej4 posted:

On Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:43:55 -0500, dpb posted:

Dpb,

Using third-party software, as you suggested, I achieved what I set out to
do with this little task. I needed a hex editor and minitrue. Minitrue
defies description for me; this is from readme.txt:

MiniTrue is a versatile utility which combines a fast and powerful
search/replace functionality with a full-featured textviewer, enabling
quick and efficient browsing, searching and/or modification of a large
number of files. MiniTrue can operate interactively and prompt to see
if
a replacement should be made or it can make all desired substitutions
automatically. MiniTrue can also print out matching lines in the manner
of the utility grep. If no strings to search for are present, MiniTrue
functions like the pager program less.

The software is freeware and available here:

http://www.idiotsdelight.net/minitrue