ppbert

A simple command-line utility to pretty print structures encoded using Erlang's External Term Format. The input is read from stdin and output on stdout, making ppbert a good candidate for shell pipelines.

At the moment, ppbert supports only a subset of the field types of the External Term Format:

• integers;
• big integers;
• floats;
• atoms (latin-1 and UTF-8);
• binaries;
• tuples;
• lists.

Usage

```sh $ ppbert >, {127, 0, 0, 1} }, {<<"Keep-alive">>, true} ] } ]

$ printf "\x83\x77\x04atom" | ppbert atom ```

Performance

Ppbert is written in Rust and offers an appreciable performance gain over using Erlang's erlang:binary_to_term/1 and io:format/2.

```sh $ cat erl_ppbert

!/usr/bin/env escript

main(Args) -> lists:foreach(fun (Filename) -> {ok, Binary} = file:readfile(Filename), io:format("~p~n", [binaryto_term(Binary)]) end, Args).

$ du large.bert 96M large.bert

$ time ./erl_ppbert large.bert >/dev/null

real 1m10.968s user 0m49.644s sys 0m13.628s

$ time ppbert

real 0m19.670s user 0m19.092s sys 0m0.432s ```

Future work

• Add flags to control the pretty printing (e.g., indentation width, number of basic values on a single line, etc.).
• Do latin-1 encoding for atoms and strings.
• Add a jq-like query language.
• Write a man page.