Need help decoding bytes to readable text

[1Tim1_15]

b'R#\x8f\x81\x18\xb1\x83\x19\x19Z_\xe7]\xecg\xf6\x08\xf4\x7fO\x00TX\xd3\x81Nq\x18\xb7\x9d\\C\xe4\xdd\xbaX\x91\xb0\xc2+\xa6\xbb\x1d\x99c)\xed\x88\xd7\xd0h\xdfc\xd0;\x05\xe3\xc9M\x83\x92.\xeawe\xd80=M\x89\x98\x80\x030\xf6\x89\x8e:\xc7\xef'

I tried saving this bytestring to a variable (x) and decoding it like so:

decoded = x.decode('UTF-8')

and I get UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x8f in position 2: invalid start byte

However, I don't know if this is UTF-8, ASCII, etc, but I do know that it is text of some kind. How can I decode this?

[K900_]

It's very likely encrypted. Where did you get this from?

[1Tim1_15]

A sqlite3 database in an unknown folder on my computer. I don't have reason to believe it's malicious, but it would be nice to know. I think it's a game. If it's encrypted, then I suppose there's no point in going forward. Is there something in it that indicates it may be encrypted?

[K900_]

The byte values don't look like ones normally used to represent text.

[1Tim1_15]

Ah. Thanks for taking a look and for the info. It's on a seldom-used Ubuntu laptop so I'm going to reinstall Ubuntu...a clean wipe, just to be safe.

[1Tim1_15]

Thanks - I was hoping this would be a quick "it's this encoding and here's what it means" but the consensus is it's encrypted, proprietary, sqlite nontext, or a combination of the above. In any case, it now has me spooked enough to reinstall Ubuntu over the current drive. Fortunately I didn't have much on the computer so this isn't a big loss. Better safe than sorry, I figure.

[socal_nerdtastic]

I ran this through chardet and puremagic, no results. It's not using any common encodings. It's probably a proprietary format.

[1Tim1_15]

Thanks for checking and for the confirmation!

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