encryption - How to extract MD5 data from a CSV file

07
2014-07
  • Paul

    I have been sent a csv file that contains a list of emails that i'm told has MD5 encryption on it. I want to be able to extract the email addresses from the file.

    If i double-click it opens in Excel as what i assume is encrypted email addresses (looks like long hexadecimal)

    Googling seems to point me in the direction of various pieces of softwaqre such as md5checker and md5summer but having downloaded them it's not clear to me how i use them to extract the data?

    Any advice most welcome.

    • Answers
  • Vouze

    md5 is a one way algorithm.

    You will need month, years or centuries to brute force


    • Related Question

    How do I get Excel to import a CSV file with commas in some of the content fields?
  • Rory Becker

    How do I get Excel to import my CSV file?

    File

    I have a file claiming to be CSV. It contains 10 fields, all of which are surrounded by double quotes (yes, even the dates and numbers.) 2 or 3 of these fields contain commas. But data in these fields is also surrounded by quotes.

    Problem

    When I try to open this file, Excel completely ignores the quotes and assumes that they are part of the data.

    It therefore splits the fields containing commas into multiple columns.

    This is bad, at least for me.

    Example data

    "20051", "", "2009 Sep 30 02:53:23", "SOMETEXT", "", "5000", "2000000", "2008 - 99999 - -99999, 2008 - unk - unk", "191 - SOMETEXT - SOMETEXT, 192 - SOMETEXT - SOMETEXT, 193 - SOMETEXT - SOMETEXT, 194 - SOMETEXT - SOMETEXT, 195 - SOMETEXT - SOMETEXT, 196 - SOMETEXT - SOMETEXT", "45 - SOMETEXT - SOMETEXT, 1162 - SOMETEXT - SOMETEXT, 140 - SOMETEXT - SOMETEXT, 141 - SOMETEXT - SOMETEXT"
"20052", "SOMETEXT", "2009 Sep 08 07:56:50", "SOMETEXT", "", "50000", "5000000", "2007 - 99999 - 99999", "146 - SOMETEXT - SOMETEXT, 145 - SOMETEXT - SOMETEXT, 147 - SOMETEXT - SOMETEXT, 148 - SOMETEXT - SOMETEXT", "103 - SOMETEXT - SOMETEXT, 1131 - SOMETEXT - SOMETEXT"

    What have I tried?

    I have used the import facility to specify delimiters and such, but this does not seem to help.

    I have tried switching "Text Delimiter" from a double quote to "{none}" and back again. This appears to only affect the first column. This would be resasonable if it were possible to click the other columns and apply this setting to each. But this is not the case, and it seems this is intended to work across columns.

    What else can I try?


    • Related Answers
  • Arjan

    I just tried a quick test that replicated your problem.

    I created a 1 line CSV in Word (which uses smart quotes) as test.csv “123”,“4,5,6” and it opened in Excel as you described.

    Try replacing “ and ” with "

    Having played with your sample I notice that Excel does not like the spaces between fields

    e.g. instead of 

    "20051", "", "2009 Sep 30 02:53:23", ...

    you want

    "20051","","2009 Sep 30 02:53:23",...

    a decent Regular Expression replacement should be able to handle it with

    Find:    |("[^"]*",) |
Replace: |\1|

    (pipe characters for visual cues only)

    Or simply modify the .Net code if you have access to it ;-)

    Also, as Arjan pointed out, you may also need to convert the file from UTF-8 to ANSI to prevent cell A1 from containing the BOM and its surrounding qoutes.

    I have come across the Catch 22 of ANSI encoded CSV not handling international characters and UTF encoded CSV not being propery handled by Excel; and not found a solution while mainting the CSV. If international character support is required, the XML (or native XLS) formats seem the only way to go—at the cost of simplicity.

  • slhck

    Have you checked the character encoding of your file? Try setting the character encoding to UTF-8.

    You can use notepad2 to change the character encoding.

  • johnb

    I was able to do this using

    a,b,c,"=""(1,2,3)"""

    which gives 4 columns

    | a | b | c | (1,2,3) |

  • Alan B

    You could also try CSVEd which is free.

  • Gerald

    I realize that this question is ( 5 years : P ) old - but I ran across this problem today and also found a solution that worked for me.

    My environment / context: I have a web page with some (form) questions that contain both double quotes and commas. Both the questions and the answers are pulled out of the database and written to an Excel file for reporting purposes.

    I had the same problem described above: The questions that included both double quotes and commas were being split into multiple columns in Excel.

    For my purposes, using two single quotes in place of a double quote did the trick.

    --> on the website, two single quotes look like a double quote to site visitors

    --> In the Excel file, again, two single quotes look like a double quote for users viewing the report data

    I realize that this solution won't work for everyone, but hopefully it will help someone.