ISO8859-1 serialization for strings

Question

I am currently investigating a weird layout for storing of what appears to be strings (medical format).

Looking at the dump for a bunch of those strings here is what I see:

$ hexdump -C out0000 
00000000  df ff 79 17 01 09 00 49  53 4f 38 38 35 39 2d 31  |..y....ISO8859-1|
00000010  02 08 00 30 30 30 30 30  30 30 30                 |...00000000|
0000001b
$ hexdump -C out0001
00000000  df ff 79 19 01 09 00 49  53 4f 38 38 35 39 2d 31  |..y....ISO8859-1|
00000010  02 0a 00 83 74 83 40 83  93 83 67 83 80           |[email protected]..|
0000001d
$ hexdump -C out0009
00000000  df ff 79 21 01 09 00 49  53 4f 38 38 35 39 2d 31  |..y!...ISO8859-1|
00000010  02 12 00 91 71 95 7e 90  ac 90 6c 95 61 83 5a 83  |....q.~...l.a.Z.|
00000020  93 83 5e 81 5b                                    |..^.[|
00000025
$ hexdump -C out0002
00000000  df ff 79 16 01 09 00 49  53 4f 38 38 35 39 2d 31  |..y....ISO8859-1|
00000010  02 07 00 46 41 4e 54 4f  4d 55                    |...FANTOMU|
0000001a
$ hexdump -C out0004
00000000  df ff 79 0f 01 09 00 49  53 4f 38 38 35 39 2d 31  |..y....ISO8859-1|
00000010  02 00 00                                          |...|
00000013

Has anyone seen this format before ? What is this ?

---

Steps to extract those weird strings:

1. You need an instance (image) from a Toshiba MRT200SP5,

2. Extract the Original Data, using eg.:

   gdcmraw -t 700d,1008 toshiba_input.dcm original_data.raw

3. Use the work in progress dump4.c to process one portion of it (Type = WSTRING)

Answer 1

with a cursory glance it appears your data is formatted like this
(assumed big endian but the actual data SHORT field appears to be little endian you may need to improvise )

the block is variable sized and the size is embedded prior to the data

typedef struct _FOO {   
BYTE[3]       magic                 \\ dfff79 same in all blocks    
BYTE[1]       siz_exc_magic&siz_fld \\ 17,19,21,16,0f  
int           another_magic         \\ 01090049  
char[8]       encode                \\ ISO8859-1   
BYTE[1]       some_byte             \\ 02 same in all blocks  
short         act_size_of_data      \\ 08,0a,12,7,0   
data[1]       variable_sized_data
}