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Sunday, January 1, 2017

Getting a pretty hex dump of a binary file.

I have been playing with binary files and how C# interacts with them for a while, but I had not found a great way to display the binary content in a meaningful way.  It took me a while to find the right keywords to bring up Quick and Dirty HexDump of a Byte Array, but it is precisely what I had been looking for for so long.  Specifically, it dumps the binary file in the 'standard' three column output that I want and is easy to implement.  The first column is the address, the next column is the hex representation of the data, and the last column is the ASCII representation of the data. Here is some sample output:

Text output from PrintBinaryFile using HexDump

I built a little command line tool to wrap the goodness of the article above, and now I have a useful utility.  Here is my code:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using System.IO;

namespace PrintBinaryFile
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            if (args.Length>0 && File.Exists(args[0]))
            {
                var buffer = File.ReadAllBytes(args[0]);
                Console.Write(HexDump(buffer));
            }
        }

        public static string HexDump(byte[] bytes, int bytesPerLine = 16)
        {
            if (bytes == null) return "<null>";
            int bytesLength = bytes.Length;

            char[] HexChars = "0123456789ABCDEF".ToCharArray();

            int firstHexColumn =
                  8                   // 8 characters for the address
                + 3;                  // 3 spaces

            int firstCharColumn = firstHexColumn
                + bytesPerLine * 3       // - 2 digit for the hexadecimal value and 1 space
                + (bytesPerLine - 1) / 8 // - 1 extra space every 8 characters from the 9th
                + 2;                  // 2 spaces 

            int lineLength = firstCharColumn
                + bytesPerLine           // - characters to show the ascii value
                + Environment.NewLine.Length; // Carriage return and line feed (should normally be 2)

            char[] line = (new String(' ', lineLength - Environment.NewLine.Length) + Environment.NewLine).ToCharArray();
            int expectedLines = (bytesLength + bytesPerLine - 1) / bytesPerLine;
            StringBuilder result = new StringBuilder(expectedLines * lineLength);

            for (int i = 0; i < bytesLength; i += bytesPerLine)
            {
                line[0] = HexChars[(i >> 28) & 0xF];
                line[1] = HexChars[(i >> 24) & 0xF];
                line[2] = HexChars[(i >> 20) & 0xF];
                line[3] = HexChars[(i >> 16) & 0xF];
                line[4] = HexChars[(i >> 12) & 0xF];
                line[5] = HexChars[(i >> 8) & 0xF];
                line[6] = HexChars[(i >> 4) & 0xF];
                line[7] = HexChars[(i >> 0) & 0xF];

                int hexColumn = firstHexColumn;
                int charColumn = firstCharColumn;

                for (int j = 0; j < bytesPerLine; j++)
                {
                    if (j > 0 && (j & 7) == 0) hexColumn++;
                    if (i + j >= bytesLength)
                    {
                        line[hexColumn] = ' ';
                        line[hexColumn + 1] = ' ';
                        line[charColumn] = ' ';
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        byte b = bytes[i + j];
                        line[hexColumn] = HexChars[(b >> 4) & 0xF];
                        line[hexColumn + 1] = HexChars[b & 0xF];
                        line[charColumn] = (b < 32 ? '·' : (char)b);
                    }
                    hexColumn += 3;
                    charColumn++;
                }
                result.Append(line);
            }
            return result.ToString();
        }
    }
}