Byte Scribe is a super simple helper tool that can load a file and display its content in bytes. Users can adjust the formatting on the fly and then copy the text to the clipboard.
Options include:
- Bytes per Line
- Uppercase / Lowercase
0xPrefix- Comma Separated
Use Cases
1. Binary File Inspection
We have created several proprietary binary file formats for Sauce. During the course of development, we have used Byte Scribe numerous times to inspect and sometimes debug the contents of our binary files.
2. Embedded Resources
Byte Scribe generates a nicely formatted text dump of binary data that can be directly inserted into our C++ code to serve as an embedded resource.
For example, our Interface library features several standard controls that require rounded edges and icons. Instead of rendering these elements on the fly, it is both more convenient and more efficient to create a packed texture with a known layout of these items. However, unlike most resources, the contents and layout of this texture are tightly coupled to the code. As such, we decided to bake this texture data into the code instead of the more usual route of depending upon an external texture.
Another example, unit tests for our parsers require binary streams. We have found Byte Scribe to be instrumental in setting up our stream parsing test cases.