 <p>The short answer is no. If you really know nothing of the format, then you are stuck. You might see some "obvious" text, in some language, but beyond that, it's pretty much impossible. Your Hex editor reads the file as a group of bytes, and displays, usually, ASCII equivalents beside the hex values. If a byte is not a printable ASCII character, it usually displays a .</p> <p>So, text aside, if you see a value $31 in the file, you have no way of knowing if this represents a single character ('1'), or is part of a 2 byte word, or a 4 byte long, or indeed an 8 byte floating point number.</p>