printable-ascii v4.0.0

Breaking Changes

Numeric representations of ASCII characters are now padded.

previously

CHARACTER   BINARY   OCTAL   DECIMAL   HEXADECIMAL
            100000   40      32        20
!           100001   41      33        21
"           100010   42      34        22

currently

CHARACTER   BINARY   OCTAL   DECIMAL   HEXADECIMAL
            0100000  040     032       20
!           0100001  041     033       21
"           0100010  042     034       22

New Features

ASCII Control Characters

ASCII control characters can now be included in both informational output and STDIN filtering.

• --control include the control characters
• --newline include the newline character AND preserve newlines when filtering STDIN

When filtering STDIN the --control option will include ASCII control characters in the output BUT the characters will be translated to printable ASCII. e.g. <NUL> instead the literal NUL character.

If the --newline option is given then newline will be specially preserved in the filtered output. Otherwise newline will be output as <EOL>

When including control characters in the informational output they will be represented by their abbreviations e.g. "NUL" instead of the literal NUL character.

$ printable-ascii --control -bd --name
CHARACTER   BINARY   DECIMAL   NAME
NUL         0000000  000       NULL
SOH         0000001  001       START OF HEADING
STX         0000010  002       START OF TEXT
ETX         0000011  003       END OF TEXT
EOT         0000100  004       END OF TRANSMISSION
ENQ         0000101  005       ENQUIRY
ACK         0000110  006       ACKNOWLEDGE
BEL         0000111  007       BELL
BS          0001000  008       BACKSPACE
TAB         0001001  009       CHARACTER TABULATION
EOL         0001010  010       LINE FEED (LF)
VT          0001011  011       LINE TABULATION
FF          0001100  012       FORM FEED (FF)
CR          0001101  013       CARRIAGE RETURN (CR)
SO          0001110  014       SHIFT OUT
SI          0001111  015       SHIFT IN
DLE         0010000  016       DATA LINK ESCAPE
DC1         0010001  017       DEVICE CONTROL ONE
DC2         0010010  018       DEVICE CONTROL TWO
DC3         0010011  019       DEVICE CONTROL THREE
DC4         0010100  020       DEVICE CONTROL FOUR
NAK         0010101  021       NEGATIVE ACKNOWLEDGE
SYN         0010110  022       SYNCHRONOUS IDLE
ETB         0010111  023       END OF TRANSMISSION BLOCK
CAN         0011000  024       CANCEL
EOM         0011001  025       END OF MEDIUM
SUB         0011010  026       SUBSTITUTE
ESC         0011011  027       ESCAPE
FS          0011100  028       INFORMATION SEPARATOR FOUR
GS          0011101  029       INFORMATION SEPARATOR THREE
RS          0011110  030       INFORMATION SEPARATOR TWO
US          0011111  031       INFORMATION SEPARATOR ONE
DEL         1111111  127       DELETE

printable-ascii v3.1.2

Bugfixes

• JSON output is no longer malformed in cases with a lot of output. There was some issue with how I was trying to nicely detect if STDIN had any contents or not. I've reverted back to my initial simple $stdin.tty? approach which unfortunately means that running the script from docker will require the -t flag.

docker run -t sdball/printable-ascii

printable-ascii v3.1.1

Bugfixes

The first character of filtered STDIN was not being filtered down to the specified ranges of printable ASCII.

The buggy behavior

$ echo "{1234}" | printable-ascii --octal-digits
{1234

Now fixed!

$ echo "{1234}" | printable-ascii --octal-digits
1234

printable-ascii v3.1.0

v3.1.0

New Features

Filtering STDIN!

Now you can pipe to printable-ascii and it will output any bytes from STDIN that are printable ASCII characters. You can even limit the characters you want to allow with --range or named ranges declarations.

When filtering STDIN any declared formatting and representations options are ignored.

$ cat Dockerfile | ./bin/printable-ascii --uppercase
FROMWORKDIRCOPYENTRYPOINT

$ echo "hello123" | ./bin/printable-ascii --numeric
123

$ echo "hello123" | ./bin/printable-ascii --lowercase
hello

You can filter anything! Any printable ASCII characters will be output. It can be a fun way to examine binary files.

$ cat printable-ascii.png | ./bin/printable-ascii | head -c 45; echo
PNGIHDRcH IDATxY\<`0$f~O_ xC IHfOZX}N*uT<;^{<

$ cat printable-ascii.png | ./bin/printable-ascii --alphabetic --numeric | head -c 45; echo
PNGIHDRcHIDATxY0fOxCIHfOZXNuT9e2Pe2Pkke2Pe2PG

$ cat [email protected] | ./bin/printable-ascii | head -c 45; echo
PNGIHDRwv IDATxS?ssgCeJR*MJ_L)dh052D45""2+u3Z%

See the "PNG" at the start there? That's actually the printable ASCII part of the header declaring the file is a PNG!

It's like a slower strings command that has more filtering options, woo!

Filtering STDIN while using docker run requires passing the -i flag to docker run to allow STDIN to go into the container from the host.

$ echo "xyzzy ⌥pl⌃ugh" | docker run -i sdball/printable-ascii
xyzzy plugh

Passing options to the script works as it should

$ echo "xyzzy ⌥pl⌃ugh" | docker run -i sdball/printable-ascii --range x-z
xyzzy

printable-ascii v3.0.2

Fixes

Fix normal --range declarations that were broken by 3.0.1 e.g. --range A-C

printable-ascii v3.0.1

Fixes

• --range options starting or ending with a literal "-" are now properly handled

$ bin/printable-ascii --range ---
-

$ bin/printable-ascii --range +--
+
,
-

$ bin/printable-ascii --range --3
-
.
/
0
1
2
3

printable-ascii v3.0.0

Breaking Changes

• --compact console output now prints a newline after output
• --json output now wraps the results in an array to make the output consistent with and without the --times option
  • now [[{"character":"6"},{"character":"9"}]]
  • previous [{"character":"6"},{"character":"1"}]
• --compact --json output is now an array of joined strings instead of an array of individual characters
  • now ["A7"]
  • previously ["A", "7"]

New Features

--times NUMBER

The --times NUMBER option repeats the requested pattern NUMBER of times.

For example: --hex-color --times 5 will output 5 random hex colors.

$ printable-ascii --hex-color --times 5
6B47F6
9365B0
55676F
A7DB92
1EC851

The repeating data does the sensible thing for each type of output.

Console

$ printable-ascii --hex-digits --random 2
C
7

$ printable-ascii --hex-digits --random 2 --times 3
B
4
0
8
5
5

Compact Console

$ printable-ascii --hex-digits --random 2 --compact
9A

$ printable-ascii --hex-digits --random 2 --times 3 --compact
A3
82
20

JSON

$ printable-ascii --hex-digits --random 2 --json | jq -c '.[]'
[{"character":"C"},{"character":"B"}]

$ printable-ascii --hex-digits --random 2 --json --times 3 | jq -c '.[]'
[{"character":"A"},{"character":"0"}]
[{"character":"2"},{"character":"D"}]
[{"character":"1"},{"character":"4"}]

Compact JSON

$ printable-ascii --hex-digits --random 2 --json --compact | jq -c '.[]'
"A0"

$ printable-ascii --hex-digits --random 2 --json --compact --times 3 | jq -c '.[]'
"B0"
"D9"
"BC"

printable-ascii v2.5.0

New Features

--hex-color option

The --hex-color option outputs a random hex color code.

Shorthand for

--hex-digits --random 6 --compact

printable-ascii v2.4.0

New Features

--compact

The --compact option only prints the ASCII characters and omits newlines. When combined with --json it puts a JSON array with only the characters.

$ printable-ascii --binary-digits
0
1

$ printable-ascii --binary-digits --compact
01%

$ printable-ascii --binary-digits --json
[{"character":"0"},{"character":"1"}]

$ printable-ascii --binary-digits --json --compact
["0","1"]

This can be used for all sorts of fun output. Like random HEX colors

$ printable-ascii --hex-digits --random 6 --compact
FADD5A%

$ printable-ascii --hex-digits --random 6 --compact
341349%

$ printable-ascii --hex-digits --random 6 --compact
B033A5%

printable-ascii v2.3.0

New Features

• Add --name as an alias to --character-name