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Microsoft Compiled HTML Help

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Microsoft Compressed HTML Help is a proprietary format for online help files. Files in this format are organized in a database-like manner. They have a set of web pages written in a subset of HTML and a hyperlinked table of contents. The help browser often displays a table of contents on the left.

A CHM help file has a ".chm" or ".CHM" suffix. The file starts with bytes "ITSF" (in ASCII). On Windows, a CHM help file can be extracted to plain HTML with the command: 

 hh.exe -decompile folder chm

There are some open source tools which can read and explore these files (see for example xCHM or GnoCHM), but they lack various features of the Microsoft Windows tools.

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