Hi,
I'm trying to write a basic offline mail reader in PHP, similar to the ones used by old-school BBSes. From a BBS you can download your mail in QWK format which saves the messages in .NDX files which are written using the old 4-byte MSBIN float format. I've read that to open them the file has to be convert to IEEE 754 format, but I'm not sure how to do that in PHP. I did find this program that'll do it in Pascal, but it's been a good number of years since I touched Pascal (almost 20) so I'm not sure how to transpose this to something I can use.
Any suggestions? Granted this could probably all be done using plain text files instead of the MSBIN files, but I'd like the process to be compatible with the BBSes still running.
My eventual goal is to create a proof of concept that'll read in and create the QWK packets, saving the content to MySQL. Then when that process is working create a module for phpBB3 so a few forums I maintain can share content with BBSes and with each other. Granted there may be better ways of doing this, but the QWK format, with an exception to it using the MSBIN format, works rather well and is very flexible.
Update:
After more research I've found this format is also commonly called MBF or Microsoft Binary Format which was used in QBasic, GWBasic, and some of the older Microsoft programming languages for DOS. I guess the original QWK application was written in one of these in the MS-DOS hay-days. Microsoft does have an old KB entry here with more info, so I'm looking into this now. I really want to keep this in PHP without hitting external applications, so I may just move forward with ASCII in the NDX files instead of the MS Binary format, which unfortunately would make it incompatible with the QWK format used by existing readers and BBSes.
Thanks for any suggestions or ideas... Take care,
Sam
Opening an MSBIN file (from QWK Packet) in PHP
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