hachoir VS pyWhat

https://github.com/vstinner/hachoir/blob/main/hachoir/subfil...

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I contributed a number of file formats a few years ago (and attempted numerous others) but ran into a number of problems with certain file formats:

1. It's not possible to read from the file until a multiple byte termination sequence is detected. [1]

2. You can't read sections of a file where the termination condition is the presence of a sequence of bytes denoting the next unrelated section of the file (and you don't want to consume/read these bytes) [2]

3. The WebIDE at the time couldn't handle very large file format specifications such as Photoshop (PSD) [3]

4. Files containing compressed or encrypted sections require a compression/encryption algorithm to be hardcoded into Kaitai struct libraries for each programming language it can output to.

The WebIDE I particularly liked as it makes it easy to get started and share results. I also liked how Kaitai Struct allows easy definition of constraints (simple ones at least) into the file format specification so that you can say "this section of the file shall have a size not exceeding header.length * 2 bytes".

Some alternative binary file format specification attempts for those interested in seeing alternatives, each with their own set of problems/pros/cons:

1. 010 Editor [4]

2. Synalysis [5]

3. hachoir [6]

4. DFDL [7]

[1] https://github.com/kaitai-io/kaitai_struct/issues/158

[2] https://github.com/kaitai-io/kaitai_struct/issues/156

[3] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/davidhicks/kaitai_struct_f...

[4] https://www.sweetscape.com/010editor/repository/templates/

[5] https://github.com/synalysis/Grammars

[6] https://github.com/vstinner/hachoir/tree/main/hachoir/parser

[7] https://github.com/DFDLSchemas/

Another one sort of related is hachoir, and specifically the hachoir-metadata script: https://github.com/vstinner/hachoir

Is there a library written in Go similar to PyWhat? I want to use a subset of the functionality for a simple go program I'm writing. I could just call PyWhat, link to lemmeknow, or even write a simple go implementation myself, but I wanted to ask if there was a pure go implementation. Thanks!

Lemmeknow is basically used for identifying text as mentioned in README and video. It is Rust implementation of PyWhat. You can see various usecases there too.

For rarity, we have got the database from pyWhat and the wiki says:

This project was inspired by u/beesec 's pyWhat

Do you mean something like this: https://github.com/bee-san/pyWhat

pyWhat enables you to easily identify emails, IP addresses and more. Feed it a .pcap file or some mysterious text or hex of a file, and it will tell you what it is. The tool is recursive, so it can identify everything in text, files and more. A shout out to the tool's author for sharing his creation.