I have been given an XML file from a client relationship database with 7 million rows. All timestamps are in this format:
<Timestamp>AAAAAAAKkVY=</Timestamp>
AAAAAAARx2M
AAAAAAAVT30
It appears the first 7 characters are always "A's" Could the last 4 digits be a HEX code or something similar? Any ideas
The repeated A at the beginning are Base64 encoded zeros. The length of the first string AAAAAAAKkVY= is 12, indicating that the original value is 8 bytes.
Assuming these values are representing 8-byte integers, you can do this in Python:
import struct
x = 'AAAAAAAKkVY='.decode('base64') # Base64-decode the string
n = struct.unpack('>q', x)[0] # Convert the bytes to an 8-byte int
print(n)
Output: 692566
The other two strings seem to be missing = padding. Adding the padding and decoding them gives:
AAAAAAARx2M=: 1165155AAAAAAAVT30=: 1396605Without more context, it is not really possible to know how those are timestamps. Also keep in mind that the numbers could be 8-byte floating-point value (doubles), but that's unlikely given the zeros at the beginning.