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Hint, get yourself a decent Text Editor program and a Hex Editor program, there are heaps free on every operating system in existence. Then you can drag and drop into either the text editor or hex editor to get a better look at whats there. You will find many files like XML that are just plain text but NOT plain english. Often though near the top will be something that identifies the program that created them, some form of comment from the program itself like the xml files may have been hand written by someone and have a comment about its purpose or it could indicate what program wrote them . The extension on the file isn't always accurate or relevantbut the file will either be ASCII(text) or binary(a special file format) and a text editor will display all the ASCII files fine and a Hex editor will show a hex dump of the binary files. binary files sometimes show bits of plain text that you can get information from like the program name that wrote the file. So get the two programs and it'll help you out. Some programs can be found that can test the files they support. For example .zip archives can be tested by winzip and 7zip to see if they can be opened and you can often run the tests from a shell and batch test all*.zip, *.rar etc files in one go. Acrobat can do the similar for PDF files. Much faster than trying to load each file one by one.
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