Re: Adding support to Wireshark for CSV, TSV and SSV data types

[Paul Offord <Paul.Offord () advance7 com>]

> Do you mean "deal with arbitrary CSV and TSV files" or "deal with IIS Web logs that are in CSV and TSV format"?

Yes - I mean arbitrary comma, tab and space separated.  IIS web logs are in Space Separated Variable format (standard 
W3 format I believe).

> And is there any reason not to just take the log file reading part of your code, make it into a libwiretap module 
> that *directly* reads those files using a WTAP_ENCAP_IIS_LOG encapsulation, and write a dissector for 
> WTAP_ENCAP_IIS_LOG?

I'm sure it's possible, and that would be a future project.  The code is currently a Win32 Console app written in C++.

> Note that this would require support for random access to the file when reading it.

Yes, and a whole lot more.  I'm going to extend my console app to automatically determine data types, and we would need 
to replicate this in Wireshark if we are to read the files directly.  I think there will be  whole bunch more 
challenges, and so you can see that integrating this code into Wireshark is going to be quite a task.

Going back to the main objective, what I'm proposing is that we enable a PCAP-NG file to contain any text-based data 
together with a schema - JSON or XML or PCAP-NG proprietary.  There would be one WTAP_ENCAP_xxx type for any text-based 
data type.  Decoding would be based on the schema data.

Best regards...Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: Wireshark-dev [mailto:wireshark-dev-bounces () wireshark org] On Behalf Of Guy Harris
Sent: 18 June 2017 23:01
To: Developer support list for Wireshark <wireshark-dev () wireshark org>
Subject: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Adding support to Wireshark for CSV, TSV and SSV data types

On Jun 18, 2017, at 5:54 PM, Paul Offord <Paul.Offord () advance7 com> wrote:

> Some time ago I wrote a program that reads Microsoft IIS web log files and converts them into PCAP-NG format.  I then 
> wrote a matching dissector to produce nice neat output.  I want to rewrite it because:
>  
>       • The field names and data types are defined in the first record of the PCAP-NG file – this is how the 
> dissector knows the layout of the file
>       • Each data record is encapsulated in a dummy Ethernet frame and I want to eliminate this
>       • I’d like to make it more general so that it can also deal with CSV, TSV and, later, variable format log 
> records

Do you mean "deal with arbitrary CSV and TSV files" or "deal with IIS Web logs that are in CSV and TSV format"?

And is there any reason not to just take the log file reading part of your code, make it into a libwiretap module that 
*directly* reads those files using a WTAP_ENCAP_IIS_LOG encapsulation, and write a dissector for WTAP_ENCAP_IIS_LOG?

Note that this would require support for random access to the file when reading it.
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