Archiv für den Monat: Oktober 2019

Convert Samsung Notes sdoc-files to txt

During a holiday I typed quite a few information in the „SNotes“-App on my Samsung Galaxy S8 phone. After my return, I couldn’t just easily copy the written text on my PC, I had to „export“ to sdoc and save them.

The trouble is, that sdoc-Files can’t be opened easily on a PC. So I figured it out on my own how to get the most of the information out of the file.

First of all you should know that every .sdoc-file is really only a .zip, so you can easily append .zip oder change the .sdoc to .zip and extract the file. That way you have access to all data (like pictures or audio). The written text is included in the „text.dat“. Unfortunately, there are quite a few bytes inside the files that are unnecessary. Here’s my command I’m using to convert the included text to plain readable text. This even works with german umlauts:

xxd -p text.dat | sed 's/00//g; s/^1d12//;' | tr -d '\n' | sed 's/01010301/0a/' | xxd -r -p | sed 's/EOF$//' >text.txt

It removes all Zero-Bytes, the Header (1d12) and the seperator between the title and the body (01010301). The final „EOF“ is unnecessary as well and afterwards everything is written to text.txt, works like a charm.