fq

Tool, language and decoders for exploring binary data.

In most cases it works the same way of jq but instead of reading JSON it reads binary formats into a JSON compatbile structure. Also each value knows from which bit ranges it comes from, can have symbolic interprestations and knows how to be presented in a useful way.

NOTE: fq is early in development and many things are missing, broken or do not make sense. That also means there is a great opportunity to help out.

Goals

• Make binary formats accessible and queryable.
• Nested formats and bit-oriented decoding.
• Quick and comfortable CLI tool.
• Bit and byte transformations and conversions.
• Programmer's calculator.

Usage

Basic usage is: fq . file.

For details see usage.md

Install

Download archive from releases page for your platform, unarchive and move the executable to PATH.

Homebrew

# install latest release
brew install wader/tap/fq

Build from source

Make sure you have go 1.17 or later installed.

To install directly from git repository do:

# build and install latest release
go install github.com/wader/fq@latest

# or build and install latest master
go install github.com/wader/fq@master

# copy binary to $PATH if needed
cp "$(go env GOPATH)/bin/fq" /usr/local/bin

To build and run tests from source directory:

make test fq
# copy binary to $PATH if needed
cp fq /usr/local/bin

Supported formats

aac_frame, adts, adts_frame, apev2, av1_ccr, av1_frame, av1_obu, avc_annexb, avc_au, avc_dcr, avc_nalu, avc_pps, avc_sei, avc_sps, bzip2, dns, elf, exif, flac, flac_frame, flac_metadatablock, flac_metadatablocks, flac_picture, flac_streaminfo, gif, gzip, hevc_annexb, hevc_au, hevc_dcr, hevc_nalu, icc_profile, id3v1, id3v11, id3v2, jpeg, json, matroska, mp3, mp3_frame, mp4, mpeg_asc, mpeg_es, mpeg_pes, mpeg_pes_packet, mpeg_spu, mpeg_ts, ogg, ogg_page, opus_packet, png, protobuf, protobuf_widevine, pssh_playready, raw, tar, tiff, vorbis_comment, vorbis_packet, vp8_frame, vp9_cfm, vp9_frame, vpx_ccr, wav, webp, xing, zip

For details see formats.md

TODO and ideas

See TODO.md

Development

See dev.md

Thanks and related projects

This project would not have been possible without itchyny's jq implementation gojq. Also want to thank HexFiend for inspiration and ideas and stedolan for inventing the jq language.

Similar projects:

• https://github.com/HexFiend/HexFiend
• https://github.com/binspector/binspector
• https://kaitai.io