The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

99 ways to program a hex, Part 17: Lua, recursion, runtime type checking

Since Lua is a dynamically typed language (“values have types, not variables”) we can check the type of a variable at runtime and behave accordingly. Before, we were restricted with just dumping a file, but we could also dump strings (which in Lua can be pure binary data). So today's version checks what type the input is; if it's a file, we read data from there, otherwise if the input is a string, we pull the next blob of data out of it.

Granted, we don't actually use that feature here, but we can more easily reuse do_dump() elsewhere.

#!/usr/bin/env lua
-- ***************************************************************
--
-- Copyright 2010 by Sean Conner.  All Rights Reserved.
--
-- This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
-- it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
-- the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
-- (at your option) any later version.
--
-- This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
-- but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
-- MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
-- GNU General Public License for more details.
--
-- You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
-- along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
--
-- Comments, questions and criticisms can be sent to: sean@conman.org
--
-- ********************************************************************

-- Style: Lua 5.1, recursion, runtime type checking

function do_dump(fpin,fpout,offset)
  local line
  
  if type(fpin) == 'string' then
    if offset > string.len(fpin) then return end
    line = fpin:sub(offset + 1,offset + 16)
  else
    line = fpin:read(16)
    if line == nil then return end
  end

  fpout:write(
  	string.format("%08X: ",offset),
  	line:gsub(".",function(c) return string.format("%02X ",c:byte()) end),
  	string.rep(" ",3 * (16 - line:len())),
  	line:gsub("%c","."),
  	"\n"
  )
  return do_dump(fpin,fpout,offset + 16)
end

-- **********************************************************************

if #arg == 0 then
  print("-----stdin-----")
  do_dump(io.stdin,io.stdout,0)
else
  for i = 1 , #arg do
    local f = io.open(arg[1],"r")
    io.stdout:write("-----",arg[1],"-----","\n")
    do_dump(f,io.stdout,0)
    f:close()
  end
end

os.exit(0)

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