What exactly causes binary file “gibberish”?

Question

I haven\'t found an answer to this particular question; perhaps there isn\'t one. But I\'ve been wondering for a while about it.

What exactly causes a binary file to

Answer 1

A text editor makes very few assumptions about the data coming into it, besides things like character encodings. Thus, it will (as you say) read the file's data as ASCII and display it that way. Since binary data doesn't always fall within the alphanumeric range, you get gibberish. As for showing the raw binary values, you need a hex editor like XVI32.

Binary files often have no context outside of the program that uses them. Some binary formats contain a 4-byte magic sequence at the beginning (for example, Java .class files start with "CAFE"), but to recognize them without their program, you need a mapping of those 4-byte sequences. I believe some Linux distros contain this information for a wide variety of binary formats and will examine the beginning of the file to attempt to identify it. Other than that, there's not much you can do.