I have developed ASCII Converter which is an online utility that deals with ASCII characters in four formats - character (displays if printable) and the corresponding ASCII value in decimal, hexadecimal and binary numbering systems. Provide any one of them and you get the remaining three representations.

This kind of utility is very helpful when one is dealing with ASCII strings in raw binary files / protocols. When reading from such a file, the hexadecimal version of the character would be available, and one might want to know which character it represents. While writing to it, one would need to convert the character or decimal representation of character into its hexadecimal counterpart before writing to the file.

Snapshot: ASCII Conversion Interface

Rahul Verma

As discussed in the previous post, RegExTester requires knowledge of regular expressions. So, I have developed another small utility which can help the user in building a regular expression using simple GUI controls.

Following are the details (Can be found on Tools page as well):

I wrote a quick utility over the weekend to test regular expressions. I found it useful and so converted it to an online CGI script available on the website, for everyone’s use.

Following are the details (Can be found on Tools page as well):

---

RegExTester - A Perl CGI script to quickly test a given regular expression. Gives a report of whether match was found along with the sub-strings that are extracted with the groups in regular expressions (if used).
Limitations:

• The script uses a GET method, which means that there is an inherent upper limit on the total length of regex and test string.

• Syntax of regex should be correct, else the script “dies” without producing any report. Edit: June22: Now syntax errors are handled and an error message is displayed.

• Because of no input validation, the regex and string are not printed back in output page. Once I have an XSS check in place, I will implement the same so that user does not have to enter the stuff again.

• It requires knowledge of regular expressions. I am working on a separate script to aid in building simple regular expressions from scratch using the GUI.

---

Snapshot 1: Providing a regular expression and test string.

Snapshot 2: Results Page.

Rahul Verma