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As you probably know, one can view the original response HTML code for any website URL by prefixing it with view-source: in the browser (e.g. view-source:https://www.google.de/).

Now interestingly, this also works for URLs that lead to files with types other than HTML. For instance, view-source:https://d3.7-zip.org/a/7z2107.exe will show the .exe file (here of 7zip) as byte stream (probably interpreted as latin1 or another encoding). You would get a similar result if you downloaded the .exe file normally and then open it in Notepad.

My question is this: When I just manually copy the code view-source: gives me for a .exe file, paste it in Notepad and then save it as .exe, the file is of roughly correct size but corrupted. Can there anything be done to fix this?

(If you wonder why anyone would want to do this, the admittedly exotic case is browser automatization with Selenium, which is not really able to download files normally, for a resource that is protected in such a way that it practically can only be downloaded by real browsers.)

Remirror
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1 Answers1

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When an application is compiled, there are static references to parts of the executable, calculated as offset in bytes. These can be as broad as the .text and .data sections of the executable, or more low-level like function call addresses and jumps.

If you open an exe in a real disassembler, you'll see that there are hard coded jumps in bytes, function addresses in bytes, etc. When you open exe in text editor, these jumps make the processor start running random code, which causes an exception. That causes Windows to believe its not a valid executable anymore.

Snaville
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