Re: Reproducible issue reading large registry file

On Thu, May 19, 2016, 'Suresh Govindachar' via vim_use wrote:
>
> Steps to reproduce issue:
>
> System: Windows 7 64 bit
>
> Gvim: VIM - Vi IMproved 7.4 (2013 Aug 10,
> compiled Jan 2 2016 14:36:11)
> MS-Windows 32-bit GUI version with OLE support
> Included patches: 1-1023
> Compiled by mool@tororo
> Big version with GUI.
>
> 1) Export entire registry to file (in my case, about 500 MBytes)

How are you exporting it? From within regedit's GUI? Or by invoking
regedit on the command line?

>
> 2) gvim.exe -u NONE -U NONE --noplugin all_reg.reg
>
> 3) takes some time and then get message just before file shows up
>
> 4) Observe message before file shows up: "all_reg.reg" [Incomplete last
> line][unix format] 3912091 lines, 523120802 characters
> Press ENTER or type command to continue
>
> 5) Hit enter
>
> 6) Observe contents of buffer:
>
> ÿ[with two dots on the top of it]þ[funny looking p]W^@i^@n^@d^@o^@w^@s
>
> [more such triples: @<readable letter>^]
>
> 7) Open all_reg.reg in notepad++: no issues, file opens very quickly, text
> is clearly seen.
>
> Please look into this.

As Tim said, this looks just like a UTF-16 file (specifically
little-endian, with a BOM) being opened as if it were in another
encoding. The only weird things to me are that it's in Unix format
instead of DOS (=Windows), and it has "Incomplete last line". I've been
successful at turning a registry text file into one such as you
describe, but it only seems to happen if I resave the file from within
Vim, and it probably depends on a few options being set. When I open a
registry text file from Vim before I've modified the file at all, it
opens correctly.

Try this -- a small elaboration on what Tim said:
After opening the file, issue:
:e ++enc=utf-16le ++ff=dos

Or you can do it from the command line with
vim ++enc=utf-16le ++ff=dos all_reg.reg

The only difference from Tim's recommendation is that we're telling it
to use DOS line endings, since it seems to incorrectly pick Unix ones.
(Then again, maybe you accidentally saved the file from within Vim and
thereby caused it to save with Unix line endings, in which case leave
off the ++ff=dos part.)

--
Eric Christopherson

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