WHAT?format


A file format recognition utility
for IBM PCs and compatibles


Version 30.0










































Boots & Pepper




WHAT?format is copyright (c) Boots & Pepper 1989-91.

It may be freely distributed provided no changes are made to WHAT.EXE
or the WHATDOC files. It may not be bundled or distributed with
commercial software without the author's permission.

WHAT is shareware. If you find it useful, please register your copy
by sending $15 (NOK 100) to:

Boots & Pepper, Pilestredet 97, N-0358 Oslo, Norway.
Giro: 1730.18.96921

Registration entitles you to a free copy of the next public release
of the program. Other feedback bug reports, information about
formats not currently supported, whatever may be sent to the
address above or to:

CompuServe: 76057,246 (Steve Pepper)
email: [email protected] (from medio May 1991)

Boots & Pepper is Steve Pepper and Dag (Boots) Hasvold. We run
Computertext BBS a bulletin board specialising in aspects of
computing in the printing industry (DTP, PostScript, SGML, text
conversion etc.) on +47-2-162650 (2400-8N1).






WHAT?format 30.0

A file format recognition utility
for IBM PCs and compatibles


Introduction WHAT?format started life as a simple utility whose
purpose was to distinguish between text files created
by WordStar and WordPerfect. It was originally written
for people working in a typesetting house which
received a lot of raw text on floppy disks all too
often without any information regarding the system
that had created the files.

As time has gone by, the program's capabilities have
been extended so that the present version can
distinguish between the native formats of thirty of
the most common word processors. In many cases it will
also distinguish between files created by different
versions of the same program, e.g. WordPerfect 4.x
(4.2 and earlier), 5.0, 5.1, etc.

In addition to native word processor formats, version
30.0 also supports a number of text interchange
formats (e.g. Document Content Architecture and Rich
Text Format), various text-only formats (ASCII, DOS,
EBCDIC, etc.), and a few print-formatted/page
description formats (PostScript, PCL, etc.).

Although it is primarily concerned with text files,
WHAT will also recognise an assortment of other common
data formats stemming from database, spreadsheet,
graphics and other applications. (A complete list of
supported formats is given in Appendix A.) Other
features include the ability to create straight hex
dumps and character set maps. These are described in
detail below under Options.

Usage To use WHAT in its basic mode as a format recognition
utility, simply type WHAT at the DOS prompt, followed
by the name of the file to be analysed. The file name
may include optional drive and path specifications, as
well as standard DOS wildcards:

C:\>WHAT myfile.doc
(analyse myfile.doc in current directory)

C:\>WHAT a:*.*
(analyse all files on disk in drive A:)

WHAT takes each file matching the file specification
and writes its name and size on the screen, analyses
it and reports the result. Unrecognized files are
reported as being of UNKNOWN FORMAT. The file name and
size are written to DOS' CON device; the result is

WHATDOC 30.0 3



written to the standard output device (normally the
console), making it possible to send the result to a
file using the usual DOS redirection techniques.

The DOS Each major format supported by WHAT has its own format
Errorlevel code that distinguishes it from all other major
formats. For example, WordPerfect has the format code
32. Upon exiting to DOS, WHAT sets the DOS errorlevel
variable to the format code corresponding to the
result it arrived at for the last of the files that
were analysed. Thus, if the last file analysed by WHAT
turns out to be in WordPerfect format, the DOS
errorlevel will be set to 32.

This feature can be used in batch files, both to
automate various kinds of file processing (conversion,
cataloging, etc.) and as a way of ensuring that files
of the wrong type do not get sent through a particular
process. An example of such a batch file, WPCONV.BAT,
is given in Appendix B. (See the description of the /E
and /F switches below for more information on using
the errorlevel feature.)

NOTE: WHAT's format codes change from version to
version, as new formats are added to the program, so
be sure to update your batch files when you receive a
new version of WHAT.

The %WHAT% Where possible, WHAT attempts to distinguish between
variable different versions of the same file format. Thus a
WordPerfect file will be identified as version 4.x
(meaning 4.2 or older), 5.0, 5.1 or whatever. In the
case of bitmap files, WHAT will often report the size
of the image, and possibly also the number of colours.
With a file in MacBinary format, WHAT reports the
file's TYPE and CREATOR. It is possible to test for
all these kinds of information using the %WHAT%
environment variable.

Before exiting to DOS, WHAT looks to see if the envir-
onment variable %WHAT% exists. If it does, WHAT sets
it to the exact result shown on the screen for the
last file analysed, e.g. "WordPerfect 5.1" or "PCX IV
640x480x256". (Note that this string can be up to 19
characters in length. An error is reported if there is
not enough room in the environment.) Appendix B gives
an example (SORTPICS.BAT) of a batch file that uses
the %WHAT% variable to sort graphics files by format.

Options NOTE: All options can be used in either upper or lower
case, and may be preceded by either a slash or a
hyphen. Those used in conjunction with file names may
appear either before or after the file specification.




WHATDOC 30.0 4



Character set Usage: WHAT /C [ >filename ]

Creates an on-screen map of all characters appearing
in the first file that matches . The user is
then given the option of writing more detailed
information (including the offset and context of the
first occurrence of each character) to the standard
output. If redirection has been specified on the
command line, the result will be a text file suitable
for viewing with Vern Buerg's LIST.

The character set option is particularly useful with
plain text files that do not use one of the standard
character sets. Note that /C uses the underline
attribute in order to create a 16x16 character set
matrix on the screen. This gives better results on
monochrome than on colour monitors.

Errorlevel Usage: WHAT /E [ >filename ]

Generates a list of format codes in a form which can
easily be modified to create batch files like those
shown in Appendix B. The output can be sent to a file
using DOS redirection.

Format code Usage: WHAT /F

Presents a list of all supported major formats which
contain the substring , together with the
corresponding format code. The operation is case
insensitive. For example:

WHAT /fperfect

will give the following result:

32 WordPerfect
46 DataPerfect
56 PlanPerfect
62 DrawPerfect

Hex dump Usage: WHAT /X [ >filename ]

Creates a hex dump of the first file that matches
. The output contains only hex values no
file offsets or character equivalents. The main
purpose of this switch is to simplify the analysis of
long and complicated formatting instructions
contained within a text file. (The resulting file is
easy to edit since it only contains hex values.) If
you merely want to view the contents of a file in hex
format, you will be better off using a file browsing
utility like LIST, PC-Tools or Norton Utilities that
also displays file offsets and ASCII equivalents.



WHATDOC 30.0 5



Help Usage: WHAT /H

Shows WHAT's help screen. The help screen is also
shown when WHAT is invoked without any command line
parameters.

List formats Usage: WHAT /L

Presents an on-screen list of all file formats
supported by the current version of WHAT.

Quiet mode Usage: WHAT /Q

Suppresses screen output (for use in batch files).

Redirection Usage: WHAT /R

Enables redirection of all three elements of WHAT's
screen output (i.e. the file's name, size and
format). Normally only the format is written to DOS'
standard output.

Commentary WHAT is not foolproof, nor is it meant to be. It
belongs to the venerable family of Q&D-utilities, and
its basic philosophy is to be right as often as
possible but without spending all day about it. It is
not as Quick as it could be, and it is no doubt a
good deal Dirtier than it would have been if I'd been
a real programmer. That said, it has been tested
fairly thoroughly on a number of systems and performs
as described in this documentation. No problems have
been reported that would consitute a threat to your
computer or data, but as always, no responsibility is
taken for damage resulting from incorrect or careless
use of the program.

How it works WHAT works by scanning the beginning of a file and
looking for specific formatting features that can
identify its format. The precise features looked for
vary. Some applications especially newer ones
create files with headers containing an ID-tag, a
kind of "thumbprint" consisting of a special sequence
of bytes that the application itself uses to
determine whether or not the file is in its native
format. For example, all files created by WordPerfect
5.0 or later (and other WP Corp products) begin with
the byte sequence FF 57 50 43 (-1,"WPC"). These kind
of files are an easy match, and WHAT will handle them
quickly and flawlessly.

Problems Other programs present greater problems, especially
those with a native format closely akin to pure
ASCII. PC-Write, for example, produces ASCII files if
the document doesn't contain guide line font commands
or text with attributes such as bold, underline etc.
Such a file will be reported as being ASCII by WHAT.

WHATDOC 30.0 6



If on the other hand, the PC-Write document contains
a few words that are underlined, the file will
resemble an ASCII file interspersed with the odd 17h
a "non-ASCII" character. This will probably be
enough for WHAT to reach a verdict of PC-Write, but
it is not difficult to imagine that the file could
have been produced by another program and that the
17h means something quite different. In such
borderline cases a programming decision has been made
based upon the assumed popularity of particular
applications. (If you disagree with the decision,
don't hesitate to let me know!) When WHAT makes a
mistake, it is often in this kind of situation.

More problems Another example will further illustrate the problems
involved in differentiating between word processing
systems that use similar formats. I recently down-
loaded an ARChive file containing a number of text
files from a bulletin board system. These files
looked like ASCII when I viewed them with LIST, but
WHAT said they were WordPerfect 4.x. In actual fact
they turned out to be UNIX-type ASCII files with line
endings marked by a single LF instead of the CR/LF
pair used under DOS. (The archive file seems to have
been put together on an Amiga.) LF (0Ah) is the code
used by WordPerfect to represent a hard return (hence
WHAT's diagnosis), so the files could equally well
have been prepared using WordPerfect (except that
they also had hard returns where there should have
been soft returns).

The question here is whether the result reached by
WHAT was acceptable. My answer based mainly upon
pragmatic considerations is yes: Wherever the file
might have come from, it is now on a PC (otherwise I
wouldn't be using WHAT!), and if it is to be edited
on a PC, the best program to use is WordPerfect. Most
ASCII editors would complain bitterly about the
missing CR at the end of each line; but WordPerfect
is over the moon, and it will even allow me to
regenerate most of the soft returns (by reading in
the file, saving it as DOS text, and reading it in
again, this time as DOS text, using the option of
converting hard returns in the hyphenation zone to
soft returns). So in this case, WordPerfect is the
best answer even though strictly speaking it is the
wrong one.

Dirty tricks If there is one thing that really slows WHAT down it
is a lot of files in unsupported formats. A couple of
dirty tricks are used to minimise this problem.
Firstly, WHAT never reads more than the first 5 Kb of
a file, reasoning that if it hasn't made up its mind
by then, it probably never will. This could in theory
lead to problems. For example, a PC-Write document
consisting of 2 3 pages of straight ASCII followed by

WHATDOC 30.0 7



a few pages of heavily formatted text will be judged
to be ASCII but you'll be in trouble if you try to
import it to, say, WordPerfect as "DOS Text". Such
situations occur so rarely in practice, however, that
the speed advantages of just looking at the beginning
of a document outweigh the potential disadvantages.

Secondly, WHAT doesn't bother to try to ascertain
whether a COM-file really is executable: The present
version quite simply ignores files with the extension
.COM (except when the only files that match the file
specification have this extension, in which case WHAT
will attempt to analyse the last one hopefully
unsuccessfully).

ASCII files The criterion for differentiating between what WHAT
and DOS files calls "ASCII text files" and "DOS text files" is
whether or not characters from the Extended ASCII set
appear in the file. An ASCII file can only contain
7-bit characters. This is an important distinction in
certain European countries where accented characters
may be represented by national versions of the
(7-bit) ISO 646 character set, so English-speaking
users will just have to live with it! In neither
format does WHAT expect to encounter any control
characters other than TAB (09h), CR (0Dh), LF (0Ah),
FF (0Ch) or a single Control-Z end-of-file marker
(1Ah).

Feedback The biggest problem with a program like WHAT is
keeping it up to date. New word processing programs
are appearing all the time, and most of them use
their own native format. Occasionally the format is
described in the documentation that follows the
application, but usually that is not the case. Some
software publishers are willing to make the details
of the format available to developers; others (like
Microsoft and IBM) keep them a closely guarded
secret.

Upgrades of existing programs also present problems.
As new formatting features are added to the applica-
tion, the native format changes in order to accommo-
date them. Sometimes these changes amount to no more
than the addition of new codes to the old format (as
when WordPerfect was upgraded from 4.1 to 4.2). More
major revisions, on the other hand, can lead to a
complete revamping of the native format (as was the
case with WordPerfect 5.0). WHAT has been designed as
far as possible to be able to handle new versions of
formats that are already supported, but no guarantees
are made. (I am fairly certain that WHAT will
recognise documents created by version 6.5 of
WordPerfect, but what happens with 9.0 documents is
anybody's guess!)


WHATDOC 30.0 8



Keeping abreast of all these changes and additions is
no easy matter (I have yet to find a company that
runs a mailing list for people interested in this
kind of information!). What that means is that WHAT
can only be improved and kept up to date with the
assistance of its users. So if you find that WHAT
makes a mistake when analysing a supported format,
experience trouble with the latest version of a
particular program, or can provide information on
file formats not currently supported by WHAT, please
do not hesitate to get in touch. The more example
files and technical information you can provide for a
particular format the better. Your efforts will be
rewarded with an acknowledgement in the next version
of WHATDOC and a typeset copy of this one. (The "wish
list" for the next version of WHAT includes support
for CGM, CUT, DXF, GEM, and PIC graphics, Quattro,
PFS, Q&A, PageMaker, and the latest versions of
DisplayWrite, Framework and Lotus 1-2-3; more
information on Word for Windows and Excel and
whatever else you and I can get our hands on!)

Thanks to... Dag Hasvold, Aron Gurski, Gisle Hannemyr, Truls
Meland, Tor Nordahl, Mike Robertson, Mats Tande and
Chris Wolf for suggestions and help.

Send comments, files and format documentation to
Steve Pepper, Pilestredet 97, N-0358 Oslo, Norway
(email: [email protected]), or log on to Computertext
BBS (2400 8-N-1) +47-2-420825.

One final thing: Don't bother suggesting that the
next version of WHAT ought to be able to recognise
non-DOS disk formats unless you are prepared to tell
me how to implement such a feature. I know it would
be enormously useful, but I am a typographer, not a
programmer!

Steve Pepper
Oslo, 19 April 1991

















WHATDOC 30.0 9



Appendix A

Text and data formats supported
by WHAT?format v. 30.0

Here is a complete list of all formats supported by
version 30.0 of WHAT. Those formats for which extra
information is given (other than version number) are
shown in bold type. Please support WHAT by helping to
make this list more comprehensive!

Word Ability WP
processors Acto WP
Am Professional
ASCII text file (09,0A,0C,0D,1A and 20..7E)
ASCII even parity
Cicero
DisplayWrite
DOS text file (as ASCII, plus 80..FE)
DSI Tekst
EBCDIC file
Enable WPF
Framework
Manuscript
MASS-11
Microsoft Word
MicroWord
Multimate
Notis WP
OfficeWriter
Ordbehandling
Palantir
PC-Write
Samna Word
Sprint
Super WP
Symphony
Ventura Publisher
Volkswriter
Windows Write
Word for Windows
WordPerfect
WordStar
WordStar 2000
XPress tagged ASCII
XyWrite

Formatted PostScript Structuring Conventions version
text DCA/RFT (DCA Revisable Form Text)
DEC DX
HP LaserJet (PCL)
IBM DCF-GML (Generalised Markup Language)
RTF (Microsoft Rich Text Format

Data bases Ability
DataPerfect

WHATDOC 30.0 10



dBASE
Enable
Reflex

Spreadsheets Ability
DIF
Enable
Excel
Lotus 1-2-3
PlanPerfect
SuperCalc
SYLK (Microsoft Symbolic Link)

Graphics Ability Am Metafile
DrawPerfect
EPSF (Encapsulated PostScript)
GIF resolution and number of colours
IFF resolution for ILBM files
IMG width and height
Lotus PIC
MacPaint
Microsoft Paint width and height
PCX version, size and number of colours
TIFF version and type (Motorola or Intel)
WPG version and type (bitmap/drawing)

Various Ability comms
ARC archive
DOS Code Page font
EXE file
LZH archive
MacBinary TYPE and CREATOR
PostScript outline font
StuffIt! archive
Windows EXE file
Windows font
ZIP archive
Miscellaneous file types from WordPerfect Corp.



















WHATDOC 30.0 11



Appendix B

Example batch files using the DOS
errorlevel and %WHAT% variable

SORTPICS.BAT @echo off
rem
(using the DOS rem SORTPICS.BAT
errorlevel) rem
rem Sort your pics using WHAT?format!
rem
rem Change to a directory containing an
rem assortment of graphics files and give
rem the command:
rem
rem for %f in (*.*) do sortpics %f
rem
rem The files are copied to different
rem directories depending on their format
rem
if not exist %1 goto :end
what %1
if errorlevel 72 goto :end
if errorlevel 71 goto :TIFF
if errorlevel 70 goto :PCX
if errorlevel 69 goto :end
if errorlevel 66 goto :IMG
if errorlevel 65 goto :end
if errorlevel 64 goto :GIF
goto :end
:TIFF
copy %1 c:\graphics\tiff
del %1
goto :end
:PCX
copy %1 c:\graphics\pcx
del %1
goto :end
:IMG
copy %1 c:\graphics\img
del %1
goto :end
:GIF
copy %1 c:\graphics\gif
del %1
goto :end
:end










WHATDOC 30.0 12



WPCONV.BAT @echo off
rem
(using the rem WPCONV.BAT
%WHAT% rem
variable) rem Automate conversion using WHAT?format!
rem
rem Change to a directory containing
rem assorted WordPerfect files and give
rem the command:
rem
rem for %f in (*.*) do wpconv %f
rem
rem The files are converted to DCA format
rem using the correct version of WP's
rem CONVERT.EXE.
rem
if not exist %1 goto :end
set what=what
what %1
if errorlevel 33 goto :notwp
if errorlevel 32 goto :wp
if errorlevel 1 goto :notwp
goto :end
:wp
if "%what%"=="WordPerfect 5.1" goto :wp51
if "%what%"=="WordPerfect 5.0" goto :wp50
if "%what%"=="WordPerfect 4.x" goto :wp4x
echo New version: %what%
goto :end
:wp51
convwp51 %1 d:\DCAstuff\%1 1 1 std.crs
goto :end
:wp50
convwp50 %1 d:\DCAstuff\%1 1 1
goto :end
:wp4x
convwp42 %1 d:\DCAstuff\%1 1 1
goto :end
:notwp
echo File is not WordPerfect format!
:end
set what=















WHATDOC 30.0 13