Extracting text files from dictioniaries

Z

zisfro

Member
Does anyone know how to extract the original text file from a user created dictionary?
I had a friend who created a very useful dictionary that I need almost every day. Now I'm trying to get it into Pleco2.0 and the easiest way seems to be to use the original text file. However, my friend has since moved back to Europe and we are no longer in touch. All I have are the 2 dictionaries: EN - CH and CH - EN
Any recommendations?
I tried opening the Pleco1.0 pdb files with just about every document reader I could think of and got nothing usable.
I'm trying to figure out a next step here because I want to use 2.0, but without these two dictionaries with specialized terms, I still need 1.0...
Thanks for any help.
 
I

ipsi

状元
Do you need the definitions? It may be possible to export just the pinyin/headword but I'm pretty sure that you can't just export the whole dictionary.

The dictionary file itself is encrypted and uses a proprietary database format, which, while technically possible to reverse-engineer, is effectvely unuseable without Pleco.

Now, I don't have Pleco 1.0 installed, so I don't know if there's an option to export it... If you're desperate, it's probably worth emailing Pleco and seeing if they're willing to extract it for you.
 
HW60

HW60

状元
What about importing the dictionaries with the PD 2.0 import function into Pleco? With the "Store imported definitions in user dict" you should have a perfect user dictionary. You only have to create a txt- or XML-file that can be imported by Pleco.
 
Z

zisfro

Member
That's a good idea about asking if they could convert for me. If its a simple process on their end, maybe they'll help me out.
They told me that it would be possible if I had the original text file or had created each entry on the handheld, neither of which work in my case.
 
Z

zisfro

Member
OK, interesting suggestion. Do you have any thoughts on how to go about creating a txt or xml file from my pdb dictionary?
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Because Pleco databases are in a proprietary format - there's no way a third-party program could decode them (unless someone took the time to reverse-engineer our format, which seems unlikely). The switch to SQLite in 2.0 is partly designed to fix situations like this by making sure that all user-created data is in a format that users can access / manipulate on their own.
 
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