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

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

Hi Guy,

The new block idea sounds good.

Just to explain further why I think this would be a useful feature.  Bear in mind that this is a demo and I accept your 
point on block types.  In the screenshot attached you can see IIS web log data merged with packet data.  Imagine that 
the packets were HTTPS rather than HTTP; you wouldn't be able to see the content in the packets but you can get a view 
of at least some of the content in the IIS log entries.

There are other data types that could be included.  For example, it's possible to export Microsoft Sysinternals Process 
Monitor trace entries to CSV.  This could be merged with network trace data to enrich it.

Best regards...Paul



-----Original Message-----
From: Wireshark-dev [mailto:wireshark-dev-bounces () wireshark org] On Behalf Of Guy Harris
Sent: 19 June 2017 17:54
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 19, 2017, at 3:06 AM, Paul Offord <Paul.Offord () advance7 com> wrote:

> > 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.

I think Microsoft have an Excellent program that reads CSV files - and possibly TSV and SSV as well - and lets you do 
various forms of processing on them; it's available for Windows and macOS.  I think there's another program called 
LibreOffice Calc that's available for those platforms and for Linux, *BSD, and other OSes as well.

I.e., what does *Wireshark* provide here, for the *general* case of CSV/TSV/SSV files, that a spreadsheet program 
doesn't?

> 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.

pcapng, unlike pcap, can have blocks in it that *don't* correspond to packets.  What's needed here are new pcapng block 
types:

        a "text source description block" (TSDB), which contains a schema and options (such as comments);

        a "text record block" (TRB), which contains:

                a "text source ID", which indicates which TSDB corresponds to the source of the record (the first TSDB 
has an ID of 0, the next one an ID of 1, etc., along the lines of Interface Description Blocks);

                the text;

                options (such as comments).

This would *not* require a DLT_/LINKTYPE_ or a WTAP_ENCAP_ value.  It would also allow packets and text records to be 
combined into one file.
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