VCRPY Binary Converter

Convert binary Python VCR cassette responses to human-readable strings.

VCR cassette responses often get saved as binary instead of a human-readable string. This makes inspecting the content difficult and depending on the VCR configuration, cassette matching impossible. This tool takes in a cassette directory and converts all binary response interactions to a human-readable string before dumping the yaml back to the cassette file. This allows for devs to properly inspect their cassette content while retaining all the original data - super useful if switching your VCR config from binary to strings.

# Takes something like the following from a vcrpy cassette:
interactions:
  response:
    body:
      string: !!binary |
        H4sIAAAAAAAAA4yRT0vEMBDFv0rJ1RaS/rc3xYJCVxZ3XfBUps0UI21a0lTUZb+7k0ovnvY4j997
        byY5MyVZwUCaOm8kZEkEaZwJIRChyXIedk2eAEb8VjCfjc0Htpb4OykNzjNJrUGwKGtwcsjDKBA8
        4OlRZEWSFFF0w3nBOYHLJK8DNQxISFmdng6uYBwm0N+s0Evf+2y2BtEKAqIsjb2V8vYv5aEq37z7
        6vTANiYkxvmVJTPblbv94xo4W9qDlOMzDT9qclG5EGkQC56uhYu2xnleHT69jxq3dhxA9dswjNLl
        TGaUS2vVqJ0ZjFFo6g5a1a/Nfyy9lpKorQKyW7OgzzqUaKCvLXzV7hO2+2i7f9onGtWpFlzHzIrz
        5fILAAD//wMAxbg+BbcBAAA=

# And turns it into this:
interactions:
  response:
    body:
      string: '{"id": "adr_8bda753a647111eeab7802fb85ae3091", "object": "Address",
        "created_at": "2023-10-06T17:55:33+00:00", "updated_at": "2023-10-06T17:55:33+00:00",
        "name": "ELVIS", "company": null, "street1": "3764 ELVIS PRESLEY BLVD", "street2":
        "", "city": "MEMPHIS", "state": "TN", "zip": "38116-4106", "country": "US",
        "phone": null, "email": null, "mode": "production", "carrier_facility": null,
        "residential": true, "federal_tax_id": null, "state_tax_id": null, "verifications":
        {}}'

Install

# Install tool
pip3 install vcrpy-bincon

# Install locally
just install

Usage

# Specify the directory where your cassette files live as the first param
vcrpy-bincon tests/cassettes

Known Side Effects

Using this tool has a couple of known (low-impact) side effects:

1. null fields in cassettes may get replaced with nothing and become empty
2. Some already human-readable strings may get re-encoded as escaped JSON strings if VCRPY had odd line breaks such as the ending quote on a newline with no other content
3. Long URL and other field values may get bumped down a line from its key pair due to the default line length of 80

Development

# Get a comprehensive list of development tools
just --list