arraydump¶

arraydump is a utility to create hexdumps in different forms, suitable for comsumption by a C/C++ compiler. The tool is inspired by the well-known xxd utility which is part of vim. We created arraydump to overcome some weaknesses of xxd.

Advantages of arraydump over xxd¶

arraydump provides the following advantages over xxd:

Element type selection: arraydump allows you to specify the element-type of the array that will be generated. The currently supported types are std::int8_t (via –type int8), std::uint8_t (via –type uint8), char (via –type char), signed char (via –type schar), and unsigned char (via –type uchar).
Use std::array<T, S> instead of C-Style arrays: Since xxd was designed to work for C projects, it makes use of plain, old, C-Style arrays. arraydump has been designed for C++ projects, and one of the decisions made during development was to use modern facilities in order to promote usage modern C++.
Support for processing multiple files at once: arraydump allows you to transform multiple files at once. You can specify a list of files and a directory for the generated files (via –output <dir>). This makes it easy and fast to transform a lot of files at once without having to resort to shell scripting magic.

Disadvantages of arraydump compared to xxd¶

Of course we live and work in an engineering world, and (almost) no tool comes with advantages alone. The folloing issues need to be considered when using arraydump.

Young project: arraydump is a very young tool. Because of this, it has not seen a lot of use outside the extfs project. This means that there are probably bugs that have not yet surfaced and might cause wrong output to be produced. If you find any bugs, please do not hessitate to report them, or even better create a pull request.
Written in Python: In contrast to xxd, which is written in C, arraydump is written in Python. There is nothing inherently bad about this, it just means that you will need a Python 3 compatible interpreter on your system to use arraydump. You will need to keep that in mind if you, for example, use the tool in your CI setup. Additionally, being written in an interpreted language, arraydump will probably use more resources for processing than xxd.
Only C++ header files can be generated: xxd provides several different output formats as well as different modes of operation. arraydump, on the other hand, was specifically designed to produce C++ header files. That is all it can do.

Usage¶

The output of arraydump -h is pretty self-explanatory

usage: arraydump [-h] [--output dir] [--columns cols] [--extension ext]
                 [--type {int8,uint8,char,schar,uchar}]
                 file [file ...]

Convert binaries to C++ headers

positional arguments:
  file                  The input file to process

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --output dir          The target directory for the generated file(s)
  --columns cols        The number of columns in the output
  --extension ext       The file extension for the generated header
  --type {int8,uint8,char,schar,uchar}
                        The array element type