File Type Identity Quandry

[william.thompsonj]

To anyone interested in solving this mystery with me:

I took a file from a program called Hero Lab and I've been trying to identify what it is/file format/how to access it's contents. I don't want to open the program and open each setting and each piece of information one at a time and copy it by hand to get it's contents because that's a royal pain in the behind (literally tens of thousands of different pieces of information I want to extract, not a small or simple task).

I have tried all of the suggested methods for identifying file types present in this thread without success. I have a file that I know is some kind of storage format but I can't identify what exactly. I've tried opening it with several programs with no success:

- Notepad (to see if it was plain text but it's not)
- Winrar and Winzip (not a known archive type)
- Windows image previewer (not an image)
- Notepad++ and Visual Studio 2010 (nothing those programs could recognize)

I've tried running file type identification utilities on it:

- A utility by the user soor on this forum (file_identify.rar)
- Marco Pontello's TrId (http://mark0.net/soft-trid-e.html)
- Definitions found by searching for the file extension on Google (it's not a Mac install file)

I don't get the feeling it's any type of database engine storage type (like a MySQL file type). It might be a SQLite file but I haven't built anything to test that theory. I don't know where to continue my search to find out what type of file this is because I've run out of ideas.

The application it came with uses tons of XML to store settings and different things. I thought it might be a kind of XML file but it's not plain text so that theory is out the window.

Anyone interested in trying to identify what this file is? I've uploaded it to my site for easy downloading here:

http://will-thompson.net/Beta.pkg

Thanks,
Will Thompso

[LovePimple]

The .PKG file extension is documented here.

[william.thompsonj]

I appreciate the response LovePimple. I looked through the file types on the page you linked but it's none of those file types. I've looked through other various file types but without success.