Help with NUL in dll file
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Good morning,
Last night, while half asleep, I was editing a DLL file for a game. I do not remember if I saved the file or closed out the file, but I was asked something about the file being from another program. I clicked on no, and now all I can see when I open up most of the DLL files is this:
Is there a way to convert this back to text I can read?
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@Joshua-Rowsom said in Help with NUL in dll file:
now all I can see when I open up most of the DLL files is this:
DLLs have been binary files since they were invented (circa 1985 with Windows 1)
I have no idea how you ever thought you were editing text when opening a DLL, and there is therefore no way for us to tell you how to get back to the situation that is impossible, AFAIK. Sorry.
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update: Well maybe you had previously made non-text characters invisible, so you just happened to be looking at the bytes that look like text characters, some of which probably aligned with actual strings in the DLL. Or maybe you were using the HexEditor plugin, which converts the bytes into two-character hexadecimal representations of those bytes. But since, after they’ve been compiled, DLLs expect everything to stay at the same relative byte position, editing that “text” in either of those ways is fraught with danger, and likely to cause the app using the edited DLL to crash.
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@Joshua-Rowsom You are in a somewhat dark small wooden cabin that has been used to store cloth bags of gunpower for decades. There is gunpower dust all over the place. Sunlight is streaming through a small window and you can see there is also a lot of dust in the air.
You have a box of matches.
What do you do?
Editing DLL files is much like playing with a box of matches in this cabin.
The message you saw probably looked like what is below though I’m puzzled that you would get this for a DLL file unless you were playing the game at the time you were editing the file and the game is making changes to the DLL.
--------------------------- Reload --------------------------- "c:\the\path\to\your\dll\file" This file has been modified by another program. Do you want to reload it and lose the changes made in Notepad++? --------------------------- Yes No ---------------------------When you make changes to a file using Notepad++ then your changes are not immediately saved to the file you are working on. If someone or something else makes changes to the file at this point then you will see the warning notice about “This file has been modified by another program.” Your choices are:
- Clicking “Yes” means that you intend to abandon the changes you had made within Notepad++ to the file. Notepad++ will reload the file so that you are seeing the current version of it.
- Clicking “No” means that you intend to continue working on the file in Notepad++. If you then save the file then you will be overwriting whatever changes that other program made.
When I get the “This file has been modified by another program” message and I was not expecting it then I usually select “No” but then Save-As the file I’m working on to a new name. I then compare the original file against the copy I just saved. That way I can see the changes someone or something else made vs. the changes I made and based on that decide if and how to update the original file.
Of course, none of that helps you with the NUL in dll file question though @PeterJones answer looks good.
