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POAny Generic Utilities or Libraries for Converting Hex Dumps into Human-readable Form?
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  1. POAny Generic Utilities or Libraries for Converting Hex Dumps into Human-readable Form?
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    copied!<p>I work a lot with serial communications with a variety of devices, and so I often have to analyze hex dumps in log files. Currently, I do this manually by looking at the dumps, looking at the protocol spec, and writing down the results. However, this is tedious and error-prone, especially whem messages contain hundreds of bytes and contain mixtures of big-endian and little-endian data, ASCII, Unicode, compression, CRCs, . . . .</p> <p>I have written a few Python scripts to assist with the more common cases. But there are lots of protocols to deal with, and it doesn't make sense to spend the time writing a custom script unless I know I'll have a lot of dumps to analyze.</p> <p>What I'd like is some sort of utility that can automate this activity. So, for example, if I have a textual hex dump like this:</p> <pre><code>7e ff 00 7b 00 13 86 04 00 41 42 43 44 56 ef 7e </code></pre> <p>and some sort of description of the message format, like this:</p> <pre><code># Field Size Byte Order Output Format Flag 1 hex Address 1 hex Control 1 hex DataType 1 decimal LineIndex 1 decimal PollAddress 2 msb hex DataSize 2 lsb decimal Data (DataSize) ascii CRC 2 lsb hex Flag 1 hex </code></pre> <p>I'd get output like this:</p> <pre><code>Flag 0x7e Address 0xff Control 0x00 DataType 123 LineIndex 0 PollAddress 0x1386 DataSize 4 Data "ABCD" CRC 0xef56 Flag 0x7e </code></pre> <p>Hardware-based protocol analyzers often have fancy features for doing this kind of thing, but I need to work with textual log files.</p> <p>Does any such utility or library exist?</p> <hr> <p>Some good answers have come up since I set up the bounty. I guess bounties work!</p> <p>Wireshark and HexEdit both look promising; I'll take a look at those, and will proabably award the bounty to whichever one suits my needs. But I'm still open to other ideas.</p>
 

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