This question sounds a little too general though, since you just list out a bunch of data storage formats, but even with a plain text file, there must be some kind of structure that you can parse. Without any knowledge of the structure, you can only guess and apply heuristics, but the then the scope of such an answer may well be beyond the scope a "Newbies" forum, or even be beyond the scope of general online message boards and into the realm of specific (data mining?) expertise.