General Binary Data Viewer for Windows Vista [closed] - file-format

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I'm looking for recommendations for a good program for 32-bit Windows Vista that will load any arbitrary binary file and display textual information or graphical visualization relevant to identifying what actual data the bits are supposed to represent. Is ther anything better than a hex editor for this kind of thing?
One thing I'd like to do is say, look at the non-visible data in a Spore PNG file to get a clue as to what's actually being stored in there. Right now I'm using WordPad and all I get is something that looks like this:
‰PNG
IHDR ¢
/Qã!$D4"Ž‚îvÚ°‰ÅØàïjÃÞÉ_{!…‡ú 9¥Ý´îÁ6 ‰ms ^
I guess what I'm looking for is a souped up hex editor that acts more like an Excel for bits so I can slice and dice statistical patterns to get a better idea of what the bits might be doing.

Try HxD:
HxD is a carefully designed and fast
hex editor which, additionally to raw
disk editing and modifying of main
memory (RAM), handles files of any
size.
The easy to use interface offers
features such as searching and
replacing, exporting,
checksums/digests, insertion of byte
patterns, a file shredder,
concatenation or splitting of files,
statistics and much more.

I like xvi32, although it seems similar to the above - I've found it to be fairly fast even for big files.

What you probably want is a hex editor. The PSPad text editor has a pretty good hex-editing mode.

I use HHD's free HexEditor, it's Free!

I use frhed and vim (with its convert to hex mode but that can be slow for big files).

Do you mean something that detects a set of known fileformats and knows how to display them? Otherwise, hex editor (for example PSPad contains one) is the best thing that you can wish for. It's just bits which can mean anything.

I use Total Commander's built-in Lister (file viewer). It can show data as text, hex, it can show images. Then there are many plugins that range from code editors / viewers, image viewers etc.
Plugins I use are
imagine for viewing images
fileinfo for displaying info of executables
HTML viewer
Syn2 - code viewer / editor with syntax highlighting
There are a lot of plugins listed on author's web page, another good source is www.totalcmd.net

I've used Hex Workshop before, it has a "Find Strings" option in the Tools menu. Not free but works great.

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which one will be more efficient in searching of a certain type of file? [closed]

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Suppose I'm designing a file manager and want to implement searching of a file by its type hypothetically then which one of these methods will be more efficient -
use the name of the file and trim the extension of each file.
use of specific bytes for the type of file we are searching for example in the case of jpeg images.
bytes 0xFF, 0xD8 indicate start of image
bytes 0xFF, 0xD9 indicate end of image
Since you have to know it's filename before open it, the name trim option will be probably faster. However, you could have false results with that method if an extension does not match with actual file type.
Doing that way will save you some system calls (open, read, maybe fseek, close).
Assuming your goal being: "search a file by its type" without further limitations you have to do it by checking the actual data.
But you might be OK with some false positives and false negatives. If you are searching for image files by looking for extensions only, you can get "image.jpg?width=1024&height=800" instead of "image.jpg" for an image file, a false negative, or "image.jpg" instead of "image.exe", a false positive.
You can, on the other side, check for the first couple of bytes in the file--most schemes for image data have an individual header. This method has much less points of failure. You can get a false positive if you got a chunk of random data with the first bytes resembling the header of an image file. Possible, but highly unlikely. You can get a false negative if the header got stripped (e.g.: on the transport, somehow, or a bad script that produced the file). Also possible and also unlikely, even more so, if not much more.
The small Unix tool file does that and once had an easy to parse text-file you could use for you own project. It's nowadays a large folder with several single files that doesn't even gets installed, only in a precompiled form. You can find the folder with the text-files online, at e.g.: http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-branches/ubuntu/saucy/file/saucy/files/head:/magic/Magdir/ The format is described in the manpage magic(5) which is also online at e.g.: https://linux.die.net/man/5/magic

How to display an image using c?

I want to display an image using c in linux platform.And now i have read the image file ( gif)into an array of char. But I don't know what to do next to display it? Can anybody help me?
This is a quite complicated question since you're not being very specific.
C in itself doesn't have a concept of an "image" or even a "display". You need to mix in some environment-specific details that add such concepts, for instance you could work with the Framebuffer in (console) Linux, the X11 window environment, GNOME/GTK+, KDE or perhaps Enlightenment.
All of these give radically different answers.
You need a graphic toolkit to do that. Plain old C language is not enough.
You can try these toolkits:
QT
GTK
There are many others that will also do what you want, but these two are among the most populars I guess.

Tool to Scan Code Comments, and convert to Standard Format [closed]

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I'm working on a C project that has seen many different authors and many different documentation styles.
I'm a big fan of doxygen and other documentation generations tools, and I would like to migrate this project to use one of these systems.
Is anybody aware of a tool that can scan source code comments for keywords like "Description", "Author", "File Name" and other sorts of context to intelligently convert comments to a standard format? If not I suppose I could write a crazy script, or convert manually.
Thanks
The only one I can think of when I read the O'Reilly's book on Lex + Yacc, was that there was code to output the comments on the command line, there was a section in chapter 2 that shows how to parse the code for comments including the // and /*..*/...There's a link on the page for examples, download the file progs.zip, the file you're looking for is ch2-09.l which needs to be built, it can be easily modified to output the comments. Then that can be used in a script to filter out 'Name', 'Description' etc...
I can post the instructions here on how to do this if you are interested?
Edit: I think I have found what you are looking for, a prebuilt comment documentation extractor here.
I think as tommieb75 suggests, a proper parser is the way to handle this.
I'd suggest looking at ANTLR, since it supports re-writing the token buffer in-place, which I think would minimise what you have to do to preserve whitespace etc - see chapter 9.7 of The Definitive ANTLR reference.
If you have relatively limited set of styles to parse, it would be fairly simple to write a Visual Studio macro (for use in the IDE) or a standalone application (for just processing the source code 'offline') that will search a file for comments and then reformat them into a new style using certain titles or tags to split them apart.
A shortcut that may help you is to use my AtomineerUtils Pro Documentation add-in. It can find and convert all the comments in a source file in one pass. Out of the box it parses XML Documentation, Doxygen, JavaDoc and Qt formats (or anything sufficiently close to them) and can then output the comment in any of those formats. It can also be configured to convert incompatible legacy comments. There are several options to aid conversion, but the most powerful calls a Visual Studio Macro with the comment text before it parses it, allowing you to apply a bit of string processing to convert legacy comments into a format that AtomineerUtils can subsequently read (an example macro for one of the most commonly used legacy styles is supplied on the website, so it's usually pretty simple to modify this to cope with your legacy format, as long as it's suitable for a computer to parse).
The converted text need not be particularly tidy - Once AtomineerUtils can extract the documentaiton entries, it will clean up the comments for you - it optionally applies word wrapping, consistent element ordering and spacing etc automatically, and ensures that the comment accurately describes the code element it documents (its entries match the params, typeparams, exceptions thrown etc) and then outputs a replacement comment in its configured format. This saves you doing a lot of work in the conversion macro to get things tidy - and once you have finished converting you can continue to use the addin to save time documenting your code, and ensure that all new comments continue in the same style.

C XML library for Embedded Systems [closed]

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I'm working on a project for an embedded system that's using XML for getting data into and out of the system. I don't want the XML handling to devolve into a bunch of bits that build XML strings using snprintf()/strcat() and friends or parse XML by counting "<" and ">" characters.
I've found several XML libraries, a couple of which might even be small enough, but the closest they come to C is C++, which is not in the cards for this system. I hoping I can find an XML library that meets the following constraints:
C source code
no dynamic memory allocation
cheap. Free is better, but copyleft won't do the trick.
It doesn't have to be a full parser - I just want to be able to pull text out of nested elements and have a reasonably simple way to generate XML that doesn't rely on format strings. Attributes aren't being used (yet), so the library doesn't need to support them even. The XML documents will be pretty small, so something that's DOM-like would be fine, as long as it'll work with client-provided buffers (parsing the raw XML in-place would be nice).
PugXML and TinyXML look to be pretty close, but I'm hoping that someone out there knows about an XML lib tailored just for C-based embedded systems that my googling is missing.
I don't know about dynamic memory allocation, but a standard C XML parser is expat, which is the underlying library for a number of parsers out there.
I am not sure but perhaps Mini-XML: Lightweight XML Library will help you:
Mini-XML only requires an ANSI C compatible compiler.
It is freeware.
Its binary size is around 100k.
It parses the whole xml-file and then store all the info into a linked list.
You could use an ASN.1 XER encoder; there's a free one at http://lionet.info/asn1c/
You could use the one from Gnome.
I have written sxmlc to be as simple as possible and I know people use it in routers, to perform in-place parsing of web queries.
Unfortunately (and I'm 5 years late...) it does use memory allocation, though kept at a minimum: one buffer to read each "XML line" (what lies between < and >, sorry ;)), and many small buffer to keep track of the tag name, attributes names and values, and text (though I always wanted to use char[16] or so for those).
And it makes use of strdup/strcpy and such.
As I want that anybody can use it freely, the licence is BSD.
Xerces-C library would be optimal to use, in this scenario.
If it is going to be pretty small XML, why not generate programatically, using sprintf or other stuff and use string extracting functions to parse the same. But as mentioned earlier, if little big, would suggest to use Xerces-c Library, as it is open source

Cross-platform editor control [closed]

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I need a cross-platform editor control to use as GUI-part in an in-house tool. The control may be commercial, but with reasonable price.
Required features:
Platforms: Win32, OS X, Linux
UTF-8 support
Fine-grained run-time control to the text style (or at least color)
Nice low-level plain C API without usual horrible bloat
Should not prevent me to have these features (even if I'll have to implement them myself):
Undo / Redo
Copy / Paste
Context menu, depending on click position in text
Toolbar, depending on cursor position in text
Sidebar panel, depending on cursor position in text
Actually above requires not simple control, but whole cross-platform GUI library.
Discarded options:
Scintilla and descendants
FLTK
Fox-toolkit
gtksourceview
Update:
Note: I've slipped in some half-written discard reasoning here, I apologize. Scintilla indeed does work on OS X. However, if I get it correctly, Scintilla's API is in C++.
Use-case:
My use-case is to write custom "semi-rigid" logic editor, where user is free to copy-paste around, add comments where he wishes, even type in text directly if he wish. But text structure is a rigid natural language representation of logic tree (somewhat AST-like in nature). I plan to write something intellisense-like (or code-template-like) to be used as the main authoring tool (instead of typing logic by hand).
BTW, storage format would not be plain text, but instead internal representation of mentioned logic tree (with comments and whitespaces etc. metainfo).
So, I have all necessary information to render text in needed colors by myself. I do not need any external lexers etc.
As John wrote, Scintilla is known to run on OS X.
Now, it is not a rich text component, if that's what you are looking for. It is a source code editor: you can't apply arbitrary colors to arbitrary segments of text, it uses a lexer to style the content.
You didn't tell us what is your use case.
[EDIT] Thanks for adding the use case.
Disclaimer 1: I don't try to "sell" Scintilla, I just try to provide you information about a component I know well, hoping that helps you... :-D
Note that the Related Sites page lists a number of alternative Editing Components which can be interesting (or not, lot of them are for Win32 only).
Disclaimer 2: I have no experience of using Scintilla outside of the Win32 platform.
But looking at the source tree, I see a scintilla/macosx folder. Among other things, it has a SciTest sub-folder with a main.cpp file. Despite its extension, it strongly looks like pure C for me. So it can be an example of how to use Scintilla in C.
Note that by design, Scintilla API is very limited: it was initially made to be used as most traditional Win32 components, by sending messages to it. The Scintilla Documentation page only lists these messages and their parameters. The main.cpp example creates the window with the component in MacOS X style and sends commands with lines like scintilla->WndProc(SCI_STYLESETFORE, 0, 0x808080);
I won't claim it does everything you need, or even that it works flawlessly on MacOS X, you have to experiment (or ask the author of the adaptation) to be sure.
Also Scintilla won't provide a toolbar nor a sidebar panel (this belongs more to the application itself). But I think it can provide enough notifications to help you keeping these side components on context.
You will need also to write a specific lexer (C++ here) for your syntax. It isn't hard if you look how works other lexers. Perhaps you will find one for a language close enough to be used as a starting point.
Perhaps of interest too is a feature to set some portions of document as read-only, although I believe this haven't been thoroughly tested.
HTH.
Scintilla and descendants (no OS X)
But, scintilla does work on OS X.
You could try GTK+ with GtkTextView, or Qt's QTextEdit.
FLTK's TextEditor widget is all you need. It is simple, straightforward, and easy to use, has utf8 and you can easily have text-styles. With just few lines you can have an editor. Check the /test/editor.cxx example. It works perfectly on OSX as well. Furthermore, all you need is explained here: http://www.fltk.org/doc-1.1/editor.html .
Well,
you might be able to use tk -- the text widget is supposedly good and flexible -- have a looksie at the tcl/tk wiki.
Or you could go for some embedded/game toolkit (like Agar) -- but there a text widget with editing capabilities would be more cumbersome, I imagine.
But saying you want to do a cross-platform C GUI and then writing off GTK seems like a whole lot of wasted time and effort, to me. You'll probably end up switching languages or using GTK.

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