hexdump 3.0

command line recipes

Dump binary data in hex form:

$ python -m hexdump binary.dat
0000000000: 00 00 00 5B 68 65 78 64  75 6D 70 5D 00 00 00 00  ...[hexdump]....
0000000010: 00 11 22 33 44 55 66 77  88 99 AA BB CC DD EE FF  .."3DUfw........

Restore binary from a saved hex dump:

$ python -m hexdump --restore hexdump.txt > binary.dat

basic API

. function:: dump(binary, size=2)

Helper to convert binary data (bytes in Python 3 and str in Python 2) to string like ‘00 DE AD BE EF’. size argument specifies length of text chunks.

. function:: dehex(text)

Helper to convert from hex string to binary data stripping whitespaces from hextext if necessary.

advanced API: write full dumps

Python 2:

>>> hexdump('\x00'*16)
00000000: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ................

Python 3:

>>> hexdump('\x00'*16)
...
TypeError: Abstract unicode data (expected bytes)
>>> hexdump.hexdump(b'\x00'*16)
00000000: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ................

Python 3 strings are arrays of abstract indexes in unicode table. That’s why hexdump is unable to dump it. You need to convert string to binary data first by specifying how integers are mapped to binary values, that means the encoding.

Here is how the same Russian text looks when transformed from abstract unicode integers of Python 3 to bytes in Windows-1251 encoding and to bytes in UTF-8.

>>> message = 'интерференция'
>>> hexdump(message.encode('windows-1251'))
00000000: E8 ED F2 E5 F0 F4 E5 F0  E5 ED F6 E8 FF           .............
>>> hexdump(message.encode('utf-8'))
00000000: D0 B8 D0 BD D1 82 D0 B5  D1 80 D1 84 D0 B5 D1 80  ................
00000010: D0 B5 D0 BD D1 86 D0 B8  D1 8F                    ..........

advanced API: restore binary data from different hexdump formats

Python 2:

>>> res = restore(
... '0010: 00 11 22 33 44 55 66 77  88 99 AA BB CC DD EE FF  .."3DUfw........')
>>> res
'\x00\x11"3DUfw\x88\x99\xaa\xbb\xcc\xdd\xee\xff'
>>> type(res)
<type 'str'>

Python 3:

>>> res = restore(
... '0010: 00 11 22 33 44 55 66 77  88 99 AA BB CC DD EE FF  .."3DUfw........')
>>> res
b'\x00\x11"3DUfw\x88\x99\xaa\xbb\xcc\xdd\xee\xff'
>>> type(res)
<class 'bytes'>

run self-tests

Manually:

$ hexdump.py --test output.txt
$ diff -u3 hextest.txt output.txt

Automatically with tox:

$ tox

ChangeLog

3.0 (2014-09-07)

• remove unused int2byte() helper

• add dehex(text) helper to convert hex string to binary data

• add ‘size’ argument to dump() helper to specify length of chunks

2.0 (2014-02-02)

• add –restore option to command line mode to get binary data back from hex dump

• support saving test output with –test logfile

• restore() from hex strings without spaces

• restore() now raises TypeError if input data is not string

• hexdump() and dumpgen() now don’t return unicode strings in Python 2.x when generator is requested

1.0 (2013-12-30)

• length of address is reduced from 10 to 8

• hexdump() got new ‘result’ keyword argument, it can be either ‘print’, ‘generator’ or ‘return’

• actual dumping logic is now in new dumpgen() generator function

• new dump(binary) function that takes binary data and returns string like “66 6F 72 6D 61 74”

• new genchunks(mixed, size) function that chunks both sequences and file like objects

0.5 (2013-06-10)

• hexdump is now also a command line utility (no restore yet)

0.4 (2013-06-09)

• fix installation with Python 3 for non English versions of Windows, thanks to George Schizas

0.3 (2013-04-29)

• fully Python 3 compatible

0.2 (2013-04-28)

• restore() to recover binary data from a hex dump in native, Far Manager and Scapy text formats (others might work as well)

• restore() is Python 3 compatible

0.1 (2013-04-28)

• working hexdump() function for Python 2

Release checklist