VNT File Documentation

Summary

A .vnt file is a vNote: a short text memo exported from a mobile phone, most often Samsung's S Memo app or an older Sony Ericsson handset. It is plain text (MIME text/x-vnote) wrapped between BEGIN:VNOTE and END:VNOTE markers, so any editor opens it. The catch is that the note body is usually Quoted-Printable encoded, so it can look garbled (full of =20 and =0D=0A) until you decode it. Strip the wrapper and decode the Quoted-Printable to read it cleanly.

Technical details

FeatureValue
Full namevNote (mobile phone text note / memo)
File extension.vnt
MIME typetext/x-vnote
Format typePlain-text note in vNote format
Object familyIrMC (Infrared Mobile Communications), like vCard and vCalendar
Originated bySony Ericsson; popularised by Samsung S Memo
IntroducedvNote defined in the IrMC spec, late 1990s
Open standardPartial (IrMC-based)
Start markerBEGIN:VNOTE
End markerEND:VNOTE
Body encodingOften ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE with a CHARSET=
SignatureNone (text marker BEGIN:VNOTE on the first line)
ContainsA single memo (or several notes back-to-back)
Native appsSamsung S Memo / Samsung Notes; Sony Ericsson Notes
Related extensions.vcf, .vcs, .vmg, .ics
Convert to.txt (after decoding)
Structure at a glance

A vNote is plain text with no binary signature. It opens with the line BEGIN:VNOTE, carries a VERSION: line (e.g. 1.1) and a BODY property holding the note text, and closes with END:VNOTE — the same object model as a vCard (.vcf) or vCalendar (.vcs). The BODY is frequently tagged CHARSET=...;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE, so spaces appear as =20 and line breaks as =0D=0A. Those are Quoted-Printable escapes, not corruption; decode them to recover the readable text. A single .vnt may contain several notes stacked back-to-back.

What is a VNT file?

A .vnt file is a vNote, a small text-note object that stores a single memo. VNT comes from the IrMC (Infrared Mobile Communications) specification, the same family of standards that produced vCard (.vcf) for contacts and vCalendar (.vcs) for events. A vNote holds one note: it begins with BEGIN:VNOTE, carries a VERSION: line and a BODY property containing the note text, and ends with END:VNOTE.

In practice people meet .vnt files in two phone ecosystems. Older Sony Ericsson feature phones originated the extension for their Notes application, and Samsung Android devices exported memos from the S Memo app as .vnt. Backing up or transferring notes off such a phone produces these files. Because it is plain text, a .vnt opens in any editor — but the body is commonly encoded, which is the source of nearly every problem people have with it.

The vNote object: markers, VERSION and BODY

A vNote follows the same line-based object structure as a vCard. Each property sits on its own line as a name, optional parameters, and a value. A minimal note looks like this:

BEGIN:VNOTE
VERSION:1.1
BODY;CHARSET=UTF-8;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE:Buy milk=0D=0A=
and bread
END:VNOTE

The BEGIN:VNOTE and END:VNOTE lines bracket the object; VERSION names the vNote version (commonly 1.1); and BODY holds the actual note text. The parameters after BODY; matter: CHARSET names the character set (UTF-8, or a Korean charset for many S Memo notes) and ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE says the text has been escaped for safe transport. One file can contain several BEGIN:VNOTE/END:VNOTE blocks stacked one after another, one per memo.

Why the note looks like gibberish: Quoted-Printable

The reason a .vnt so often appears as nonsense in Notepad is Quoted-Printable encoding. Quoted-Printable represents bytes that are not plain printable ASCII as an equals sign followed by two hex digits, so a space becomes =20, a carriage-return/line-feed becomes =0D=0A, and a non-Latin character such as a Korean syllable becomes a run like =EC=95=88. A trailing = at the end of a line is a soft line break that the decoder removes. None of this is corruption; it is a deliberate encoding that lets line breaks and non-ASCII characters survive being copied between systems.

=20        a space
=0D=0A     a CR LF line break
=EC=95=88  three bytes of a UTF-8 / multi-byte character
=  (EOL)   soft line break, removed on decode

To read the note, you strip the BEGIN/VERSION/END lines and run the BODY value through a Quoted-Printable decoder, honouring the declared CHARSET. Notepad++'s MIME Tools plugin has a “Quoted-printable Decode” command; many online decoders do the same. The result is the clean note text, which you can then save as a plain .txt file.

Reading a VNT and getting plain text

Any text editor opens a .vnt to show the raw markers, and that is enough to confirm what the file is. To make the note readable, the useful conversion is to .txt: open the file, delete the BEGIN:VNOTE, VERSION and END:VNOTE lines, decode the Quoted-Printable body (Notepad++ MIME Tools, or an online decoder), and save the plain text. On a Samsung phone you can instead import the .vnt back into the notes app (S Memo on older devices, Samsung Notes on newer ones), which handles the encoding for you and displays the memo natively.

Converting a vNote to vCard (.vcf) is pointless: vCard stores contacts, not memos, and a note has no contact fields to map. The file itself is just a short text note with no executable content, so it is safe to open; the only real issue is the encoding making the text look garbled, which is a readability problem rather than a security one. As with any personal export, treat the contents as private.

Frequently asked questions

How do I open a VNT file on my computer?

Open it in any text editor (Notepad, TextEdit). If the note text looks garbled with =20 and =0D=0A codes, it is Quoted-Printable encoded and needs decoding — use Notepad++'s MIME Tools plugin or an online Quoted-Printable decoder.

Why does my VNT file look like =20 =0D=0A gibberish?

Those are Quoted-Printable escape sequences: =20 is a space and =0D=0A is a line break. Strip the BEGIN/END wrapper and run the body through a Quoted-Printable decoder to recover the readable note.

How do I convert a VNT note to a normal .txt file?

Remove the BEGIN:VNOTE, VERSION and END:VNOTE lines, decode the Quoted-Printable body, and save the result as .txt. That leaves you with the plain, readable note text.

References