BIO - Binary Input Output

bio is a binary file manipulation tool allowing users to write binary files directly using a traditional text editor.

• Designed to assist developers of binary file formats & others working closely with them
• bio is intended to decouple the reading and the writing of binary files for easier debugging

Building BIO

1. cd to the project root directory
2. Run the following bash commands

cd build
cmake ..
make

3. The executable will be installed under build/src

Usaage & Options

bio will read from stdin and will output to stdout, I/O redirection is done via shell I/O redirection

Recognized file format keywords

• Human Readable Hex: hex
• Human Readable Binary: hrbin
• Binary: bin

Command Invocation

bio -o output_type -i input_type < input/file/path > output/file/path

Options

Option	Usage
-o / --output	Specify output file format
-i / --input	Specify input file format
-f	Format output
-s	Specify start address to read to / address to start writing at (inclusive)
-e	Specify end address for reading / address to end writing at (inclusive)

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Supported Transformations

1. Binary to Human Readable Binary (ASCII encoded)
   • Binary is interpreted one byte at a time, each byte is converted to an ASCII string representing it's binary value

The byte 00000101 will be translated to the ASCII string "00000101"

2. Binary to Human Readable Hex (ASCII encoded)
   • Binary is interpreted one byte at a time, each byte is converted to an ASCII string representing it's hex value

The byte 01111111 will be translated to the ASCII string "7F"

3. Human Readable Binary (ASCII encoded) to Binary
   • ASCII is interpreted as binary where each ASCII character corresponds to one bit of binary

The string "00001011" will be translated to the byte 00001011

4. Human Readable Hex (ASCII encoded) to Binary
   • ASCII is interpreted as binary where each ASCII character corresponds to a nibble of binary (based on that character's hex value)

The string "7F 46" will be translated to the byte sequence 01111111 01000110

Noteworthy Behavior

• When transforming ASCII text to binary Ex. bmanip -i hex -o bin < input/file/path
  • Incomplete bytes at the end of a file will be truncated. A file containing the string "00101" will be truncated to an empty binary file on transformation as it contains less than one byte of information
• When transforming ASCII text to binary
  1. All whitespace characters will be ignored
  2. Any non whitespace characters that are not in the alphabet of the input format (Ex 'Q' is not in the alphabet for the hex format) will be treated as the value 0