Trouble opening web logs

[jessegaron]

Hi there, please bear with me as my technical knowledge is not great.

I have been reading my web logs with textpad doing the following:

Logging into 1&1 > web statistics > show original log files.

This gives me a folder full of files with different extensions such as .dat, .gif, .gz. Someone told me that to view my weblogs I had to copy the files that were called access.(2 digit number).gz over to my hard drive and then open them with textpad. The first couple of times I did this it worked fine.

I have now gone back to my weblogs to get the rest of the access.gz files to view with textpad. I copied them to a new folder on my hard drive, but when I tried to open one it opened but the text is unreadable, ie it looks like hyroglyphics with lots of strange characters. This is the same for all the rest of the access.gz files I've copied over today.

So I tried to re-open the first web log file I had downloaded (the one which worked), and it worked fine.

If I now compare the one which works, to the ones which don't work (ie bring up the strange characters/unreadable), the only difference I can see is that the one which works doesn't seem to have .gz at the end of the filename anymore, whilst the others all do.

Please could somebody tell me how I can open the unreadable files in a readable format? It would be much appreciated.

Thanks very much.

[MichaelD]

Files with the extension .gz are zipped files.
You need to unzip them before opening in textpad.

[ben_josephs]

The unreadable files have been compressed with gzip. You can uncompress them with WinZip (or, presumably, other file compression GUI apps) or with the command-line utility gunzip (available, for example, from http://www.cygwin.com/).