What language is to binary, as Perl is to text?

Posted by ehdr on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by ehdr
Published on 2009-06-14T18:31:23Z Indexed on 2010/03/18 23:21 UTC
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I am looking for a scripting (or higher level programming) language (or e.g. modules for Python or similar languages) for effortlessly analyzing and manipulating binary data in files (e.g. core dumps), much like Perl allows manipulating text files very smoothly.

Things I want to do include presenting arbitrary chunks of the data in various forms (binary, decimal, hex), convert data from one endianess to another, etc. That is, things you normally would use C or assembly for, but I'm looking for a language which allows for writing tiny pieces of code for highly specific, one-time purposes very quickly.

Any suggestions?

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