How to convert °& to readable date?

Question

I am converting a database that was made in the 80's and it seems that the date for some tables is stored as characters. There are 2 columns of data. The first column has data formatted like this:

°& C2 024

The second column is a plain text description:

Description of some stuff

The data gets imported into a 'table' view. C2 defines the table header, 024 defines the row and °& defines what day the table data is pulled in to. Example:

 Date: 2/21/2007
       C1                   C2                       C3                   C4
 000
 003
 006
 009
 012
 015
 018
 021
 024                        Description of some stu...
 027

I have tried converting dates to hex and comparing the hex to character map with no luck.

I have tried using unix date by following instructions from: http://smallbusiness.chron.com/convert-date-hexadecimal-56217.html with no success.

Sample values and known dates:

°&  -  2/21/2007
¬&  -  2/7/2007
+(  -  2/6/2007
ª&  -  2/5/2007

Answer 1

Your question cannot be answered as asked. It's crucial to know the numbers in that date column, because that's assuredly what they are. They are not strings in the encoding you happen to be using 30 years later.

You mention the °& sequence. If you are using Linux with ISO 8859-1 encoding, that degree symbol is B0. If you are using a Windows console with CP850 encoding, it's F8. We also don't know the endianism of the data, which might explain the mystery of +(.

So the first order of business is to learn the actual bytes in the column. Print them in hexadecimal, and convert them to decimal interpreted as big- and little-endian. Then maybe you'll see a pattern that lets you establish the epoch. From there it's all fresh powder and blue sky.