Fluently Reading, Writing and Speaking Hexadecimal with Gepetto´s Help

Many engineers are exposed to binary data. These can be files or data exchanged over network links. When involved in the verification and validation of systems that deal with specific protocols or binary data storage, it is often tedious to analyse the hexadecimal dumps in order to find specific parameters of interest. Despite detailed protocol specifications, it takes a lot of manual effort to inspect byte after byte. This is not only a laborious work, but it is also very error-prone, especially when messages are very complex, contain mixtures of big- and little-endianess, timestamps, ASCII, Unicode, base-64 images, calibrated data and others... Furthermore, when having large amount of data, it isn´t straight forward to extract all the parameters of interest for offline data correlation or analysis. Last, but not least, there is today no generic test tool that allows to autonomously interpret and respond to any protocol written over the Internet Transmission Control Protocol (TCP/IP). Indeed, many various file formats and protocols exist, but writing a new tool for each of them, by having the format definitions hard-coded, is not always very efficient. A lot of time and money is wasted as people keep re-inventing the wheel again and again. Gepetto (the GEneric Processing Editing and Testing TOol) tries to provide a solution to this problematic.