Linux

It looks like it's in a binary format and is printing control characters because it isn't a format intended to be viewed/edited. You could try opening it in a hex editor and see if you can make any sense from that.

Doing this by hand is challenging but possible.

First you need a hex editor, not a text editor. xxd on linux will get you started but you might want something a little more user friendly.

Then look for a label for a value you know, xxd and other hex editors will show ascii text on the side. Hopefully you'll be able to identify the value (in hexadecimal, probably 4 bytes but could be 1, 2, or 8 as well) somewhere before or after the label. You might have to get familiar with endianness, two's compliment, and binary floating point before the numbers make sense.

Once you know how to read a value after a label you'll need to find some label for the information you don't know. If it isn't displayed in the program it might not have a super readable label.

• hexdump comes stock with most distros, no editing features, but hexdump -C filename will at least let you see what’s in the file
• from control characters and control codes, it looks like everything is separated by a set of three NUL characters (\00 in first screenshot or ^@ in the nano screenshot)
  • EDIT: so the field names are three NUL characters, text for the name, and SOH (^A) terminating the field name – then a padded line for the field values (values are probably meant to be fixed length)
• if you don’t find anything more convenient, as a last resort, you can turn to perl and sed, they were originally designed for situations like this, trying to get meaningful data out of disparate file formats

Use a hex editor to read binary files. I recommend ImHex https://imhex.werwolv.net/ because it includes all sorts of advanced analysis stuff.

Can you provide the file on GitHub or something?