Re: Suggestion: Using script output - Human-readable and machine-parseable

[David Fifield <david () bamsoftware com>]

On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 03:46:41PM -0500, Daniel Miller wrote:
> Hey list,
>
> From the Nmap TODO:
> > o Nmap should have a better way to handle XML script output.
> > o We currently just stick the current script output text into an XML tag.
> May I make a suggestion? If we format script output as YAML
> (http://www.yaml.org/), it will be machine-readable, while
> preserving the human-readable nature. There are a couple of YAML
> bindings for Lua: libyaml (http://yaml.luaforge.net/) and libsyck
> (https://github.com/indeyets/syck/tree/master/ext/lua)
>
> The quickest way to support this straight off would be to modify
> stdnse.format_output to output YAML. The NSE runtime could quote
> non-YAML return values as block-literal scalars, until such time as
> they are rewritten to return more useful formatted output. A
> downside would be that output would take a few more lines than
> before, though this could be overcome by using "flow styles," of
> which JSON is a proper subset.
>
> Benefits of doing this are:
> * extensibility without requiring modifications to Nmap XML schema
> * Human-readable nature of YAML means a single output format for
> human and machine consumers
> * existing structured-output using stdnse.format_output means very
> few changes for script authors
> * YAML bindings available for Lua, Python, Perl, Ruby, C, and many
> other languages.

At first blush, I like this YAML idea. How might it handle tabular data,
like that of nfs-ls?

|   NFS Export: /mnt/nfs/files
|   NFS Access: Read Lookup NoModify NoExtend NoDelete NoExecute
|
|     PERMISSION  UID   GID   SIZE     MODIFICATION TIME  FILENAME
|     drwxr-xr-x  1000  100   4096     2010-06-17 12:28   /mnt/nfs/files
|     drwxr--r--  1000  1002  4096     2010-05-14 12:58   sources
|     -rw-------  1000  1002  23606    2010-06-17 12:28   notes

David Fifield
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