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Comment by nneonneo | Hacker News Reader

I used Hachoir (https://github.com/haypo/hachoir3), a Python library that I've contributed to. Hachoir disassembles files using a library of parsers, with the intent of describing the function of every single bit in the file. You can see the resulting disassemblies (rendered with the hachoir-wx GUI) here: http://imgur.com/a/F1cnV

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And here I'm refactoring a PHP application feeling like I've come so far. I love that I always have more to learn.

What an incredible tool... I have a webapp that has as a small component the analysis of JPEG metadata, this will be very useful for future development.

I've just started disassembling a report file format. In python. This is going to be so useful. Thanks!!

Woah, that's a fascinating tool! What other sorts of things could Hachoir be used for?

I use Hachoir for a lot of tasks - digital forensics (examining file tables on a filesystem, discovering slack space taken up by hidden data, etc.); for metadata extraction (for which the hachoir-metadata subproject is designed); for file carving (either with hachoir-subfile or manually); and just to geek out about file formats (did you know .doc/.ppt is secretly a FAT filesystem?).

Funny, I had no idea it could do all that. I've been using it in production for years to extract width/height/duration of media files at compile time so my loading placeholders are perfectly sized at runtime in a basic web app.

Sweet tool recommendation! Bookmarking that :-) Thx

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