Tag
case studies
A firmware update changes what a device sends, and the usual way to find out what changed is to capture its traffic before and after and stare at hex dumps. EByte 0.5.0 …
case studies
A PNG file is an 8-byte signature followed by chunks, and every chunk ends with a CRC-32 of its type and data. Change one byte of a comment by hand and the image is …
case studies
EByte 0.7.0 runs in a web browser. The release has a new asset, ebyte-wasm.zip, which is the same Go library compiled to WebAssembly, and the demo page on this site loads …
case studies
Every earlier case study ended with the same chore. Change the length of anything and some size field elsewhere in the file goes stale, and you fix it yourself: riff_size …
case studies
EByte 0.6.0 adds three kinds of field that real formats kept asking for. There are floating-point numbers. There are bit fields, several small numbers packed into the …
explainers
A text file explains itself. Open a CSV or a JSON file and you can read it, more or less. A binary file doesn’t. Open one in a hex editor and you see rows of …
the name
EByte is a tool that cares about bytes, every one of them, so the name starts there. The word itself is younger than most people guess, and its odd spelling was on …
case studies
BMP is about as plain as image formats get, which makes it a good test of whether a schema can describe a real file down to the last byte. This case study made a tiny …
case studies
A ZIP file is a good test of whether a schema can follow a real format’s bookkeeping. Every file inside it is described twice: once in a local header just before …
case studies
The example that ships with EByte is a made-up format. This case study uses a real one: a WAV audio file, made by Python’s standard wave module and read with the …
case studies
The first WAV case study used a schema that knew exactly three chunks in a fixed order. Real WAV files aren’t that tidy. Recorders and editors add a LIST chunk with …
releases
EByte 0.1 is out. It’s a small Go library and a command-line tool for binary file formats, and it does one thing that sounds obvious until you’ve tried it: …
testing
A codec has a sneaky way of passing its own tests. If the decoder and the encoder share a mistake, say both read a count from the wrong byte, then decoding a file and …
use examples
Most of the time nobody opens a binary file by hand. Files arrive from devices, uploads and exports, and something has to decide which ones are fine before anything else …