Schneider: Unity Pro ZEF files

As it happens, I wanted to write a post about some code that I wrote for an automation project – but as I am writing this, I haven’t purchased my own copy of Schneider’s Unity Pro. But it led to something interesting…

Knowing that much of the programs are stored in XML format, I went searching some files to see if I could find the XML files.

Step 1: Look at the files in a text editor (HEX)

bash# xxd file.zef
00000000: 504b 0304 0a00 0000 0000 cd5c ae50 0000  PK.........\.P..
00000010: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0400 0000 4454  ..............DT
00000020: 4d2f 504b 0304 0a00 0000 0000 cd5c ae50  M/PK.........\.P
00000030: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0f00 0000  ................
00000040: 4454 4d2f 4269 6e61 7279 4669 6c65 2f50  DTM/BinaryFile/P
00000050: 4b03 0414 0000 0008 00cd 5cae 50e2 d17a  K.........\.P..z
00000060: 1434 0100 00ae 0300 0016 0000 0044 544d  .4...........DTM
00000070: 2f46 4454 4454 4d54 6f70 6f6c 6f67 792e  /FDTDTMTopology.
00000080: 786d 6c9d 92eb 4ec2 4010 85cf a334 fc07  xml...N.@....4..
00000090: 0435 3104 4924 6862 14fe d017 b050 bcf5  .51.I$hb.....P..

As it turns out the start of the file 0x50 0x4b 0x03 0x04 also happens to be the same as a ZIP file.

So I renamed it “file.zip” and unziped and there was my XML file called “file.XEF”