4 ms·

Came to say something similar. There was a discussion a couple of weeks back on Metafilter about using this technique to modify comments within Word files. Hand

• TeMPOraL 8y ago
  At my previous job we were working on a project that had a "propertiary" format that was just an XML file with a different file extension. At some point they asked to GZIP that XML before saving, though. So one day, I'm sitting at customer's office, working on something different, when they come and tell me they have this problem when the application is fed this particular file. I say to one of their devs, show me the file in text editor. They open it, and seeing garbage, say "it's no use". I immediately recognized the ZIP header, so I tell them, unzip it and open the output. Lo and behold, an XML content that let me debug their problem without running the application. Their technical people were impressed by my "wizardy". (Probably one of the reasons why they later asked my colleague to "encrypt" the file by running some binary transformation on the zipped XML before saving it.)