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, . . . .
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.
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:
7e ff 00 7b 00 13 86 04
00 41 42 43 44 56 ef 7e
and some sort of description of the message format, like this:
# 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
I'd get output like this:
Flag 0x7e
Address 0xff
Control 0x00
DataType 123
LineIndex 0
PollAddress 0x1386
DataSize 4
Data "ABCD"
CRC 0xef56
Flag 0x7e
Hardware-based protocol analyzers often have fancy features for doing this kind of thing, but I need to work with textual log files.
Does any such utility or library exist?
Wireshark is quite good at opening network protocols.