gbigwood / bytes-to-bitmap

Visualise the bytes of any file as a bitmap. Useful for visually inspecting for corrupt files.

Bytes-To-Bitmap

Visualise the bytes of any file as a bitmap. Useful for visually inspecting for corrupt files.

Why?

Sometime files may be corrupt, containing large runs of 0'd bytes. Maybe you do not know whether files are corrupt, and would like to be able to quickly inspect the files for said corrupt blocks.

Maybe you just want to view your PhD thesis as raw bytes?

• No external libraries, pure python 2.7 http://www.python.org/getit/ Please don't use Python 3.

Usage

Assuming that Python is correctly installed, you can simply click on the python file. A dialogue should pop up asking you to select a file to process.

If you prefer to run in a Terminal so that you can use the script to process a large number of files, run the script like this:

python bitMapMaker.py Desert.jpg True outPutFile.bmp

The second argument indicates whether the image should be scaled to 1024*768. If the user does not provide arguments then the gui will prompt the user for file selection.

A corrupt jpg is included for demonstration purposes.

Why the blue bar?

Bytes from the input file are represented as black and white pixels. Sometimes due to rounding, we must fill in some pixels, but there are no remaining bytes in the input file. We therefore represent these pixels using a blue colour.

References

Writing a bitmap without using an external library requires manually constructing an appropriate header. I used the following code to do so: http://pseentertainmentcorp.com/smf/index.php?topic=2034.0

bytes-to-bitmap's Issues

Improve mapping algorithm

Do a better job of making a generic solution to scaling the pixels and bytes.

improve argument processing

• Handle cases where user cancels file dialogue
• command line flags for width and height