txtscan

A small command-line program that reports on general statistics and interesting characters inside text file(s).

Examples

% txtscan 1.eml /etc/moduli
1.eml
  Bytes: 97,910
  Lines: 2,343
  Interesting Characters:
    '\t' (chr 9): 1 time
  Line Endings:
    \r\n  (Windows): 2,343 times
/etc/moduli
  Bytes: 242,153
  Lines: 262
  No Interesting Characters.
  Line Endings:
    \n (UNIX / OS X): 262 times

Standard input scanning works too:

% date | txtscan -
<stdin>
  Bytes: 29
  Lines: 1
  No Interesting Characters.
  Line Endings:
    \n (UNIX / OS X): 1 time

Verbose mode reports all the positions of the "interesting characters":

% echo -e '\nwhat?\tin blazes\nis happening\r\nin\bthis\ttext' | txtscan -v -
<stdin>
  L1 C5: '\t' (chr 9)
  L3 C2: '\x08' (chr 8)
  L3 C7: '\t' (chr 9)
  Bytes: 44
  Lines: 4
  Interesting Characters:
    '\x08' (chr 8): 1 time
    '\t' (chr 9): 2 times
  Line Endings:
    \n (UNIX / OS X): 3 times
    \r\n  (Windows): 1 time	

What's "Interesting"?

txtscan only reports on things that aren't in this list:

• A-Z, a-z, 0-9
• space, newline (\n), carriage return (\r)
• comma, period, colon, semicolon, exclamation mark, question mark (',' and '.' and ':' and ';' and '!' and '?')
• greater than, less than ('<' and '>')
• forward slash, backslash ('/' and '')
• these symbols: '@', '#', '$', '%', '^', '&', '*'
• the dash, underscore, equals, and plus symbols ('-', '_', '=', '+')
• open and close brackets and braces and parens: '[' and ']' and '{' and '}' and '(' and ')'
• single quotes and double quotes (' and ")
• pipe/vertical bar ('|')

** Note that both tab and the euro symbol are considered "interesting".**

Help Message

usage: txtscan [-h] [-v] input [input ...]

Print information about the characters in the input text

positional arguments:
  input          The file(s) to scan. Use '-' for standard input.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help     show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose  Verbosely report on each interesting character on each line

License

The license is BSD-like. See LICENSE.txt for details.

To Do

• Although this is primarily aimed at scanning ASCII files, it would be nice (and probably not too hard) to add Unicode support, particularly support for finding unicode errors
• Add options to exclude certain characters from reporting or to scan only for certain characters