Word is not text

Note to self: next time you have occasion to commit a Word document to CVS (dog forbid), make sure you tell it that it’s a binary file, not text.

I foolishly let Eclipse decide for me… and it picked text. Sigh. So a week after I had left the project, I get a call from my ex-manager complaining that certain documents could not be opened. Since one of the last things I did before leaving the job was to wipe my PC’s hard drive, I was a little concerned.

But a quick inspection of the “corrupt” Word document confirmed my suspicion. Every newline (0x0a) character was indeed preceed by a carriage return (0x0d). DOS line breaks! Thanks for that one, Bill!

Anyway, [this] 1 small piece of Perl hackery later, and the document opened fine (in OpenOffice anyway).