I have some FZ files in binary format that I’m unable to open in the Fritzing app, as it seems the application only supports text-based files like XML (based on what I’ve read in the documentation).
Is there a way to convert these binary FZ files into XML?
I’ve tried using FPack/Funpack methods for compression and decompression, but had no success. Interestingly, I can open the FZ files just fine using the BoardViewer desktop application.
Any help would be appreciated!
A fz file is part of a .fzz file and is in fact xml. A fz file without the .fzz for the associated svgs can’t be opened in Fritzing you need the complete .fzz file to open it. The first thing to try is edit the fz file with a text editor. It if doesn’t look something like this:
then it isn’t a Fritzing fz file and likely won’t work in Fritizng. The next thing to try is to compress just the .fz file (which will work it there are no external parts) using a zip program (I use 7zip) to create a .fzz file like test.fzz and try loading that with Fritzing. As noted if there are none core parts in the .fz file you will get error messages due to the missing svgs. In more detail I created test.fzz like this (Note the 74x125 is not in core parts intentionally to produce associated svg files) :
then saved the resulting .fzz file as test.fzz (here I also unzipped the resulting .fzz file in to directory test)
That produces this set of files which includes the .fz file (circled in green) and the svg and fzp file associated with the custom part (circled in blue.) without both sets of files the .fzz file won’t load.
This is the top of the .fz file as above
this is the part that identifies the fzp and svg files for the custom parts and which will cause error messages if they aren’t there.
Peter
Since you say it is binary, maybe your .fz file is really a .fzz file. That is what Fritzing would normally create for a sketch. That is really a .zip file containing the files that Peter mentions. Try just renaming it to .fzz so that Fritzing will recognize it.
