Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] [PATCH] New menu items to copy packet data

From: Stephen Fisher <stephentfisher@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2007 11:33:00 -0800
On Mon, Jan 29, 2007 at 10:22:15AM -0000, Douglas Pratley wrote:

> >  - Removed base64 encoding support as we discussed.  This leaves 
> > room for a base64 decoder as a future feature.
> 
> Could you give an example of how you might see this working, perhaps 
> with a capture file?
> Some initial thoughts - I think we'd need to give the user more power 
> to select an exact set of bytes (to avoid preamble / postamble). If 
> we're talking about e.g. mail attachments on SMTP, then the clipboard 
> might not be a good target - straight to file might be better.

I think users would be satisfied with a pop-up screen that displayed the 
decoded content.  We've also considered adding this to the follow tcp 
stream window.  I started to, but ran into the problem where our(?) code 
is adding extra line breaks when you copy and paste or save out of a 
follow tcp stream window.

> Are there any other encodings / decodings it would be worth having 
> available (uuencode? zip?). This might be better done as a full 
> "Select bytes and decode / encode" feature rather than something in a 
> copy menu.

Good point.  For viewing encoded e-mail contents, uudecode support may 
be useful, though it's not very popular these days as far as I can tell.  
We could go the whole way and even add viewers for images contained 
within capture files.  I'm not sure how useful this would be?


Steve