Finding Data
Cygnus takes a simple yet powerful approach in specifying data that you
want to find. The Find dialog box provides three tabs. They are labeled
Find Text, Find Value, and Find Data.
Find Text Tab (Find Dialog Box)
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The Find Text tab allows you to find a string of text. This type of
search is common to many editors. You simply enter the string of text you
want to search for. There is a Unicode option if you want to
find matching Unicode text. In addition, when searching for Unicode text,
Cygnus lets you specify if you want to use big-endian byte ordering.
Big-endian byte ordering is used by processors made by companies such as
Motorola. It is the reverse byte ordering used by Intel processors.
Find Value Tab (Find Dialog Box)
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The Find Value tab allows you to search for non-text values.
Traditionally, searching for values in a hex editor is tricky because you
can only determine the value of any given data when you know the type of
that data. Cygnus supports many different data types and you can search
for specific values using any of those types.
Data Type List
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This provides a great deal of flexibility. If you wanted, for example,
to find a FILETIME data type with a value of 1/1/2005 3:30 PM, you can
simply select the FILETIME data type and enter "1/1/2005 3:30pm" in the
Value field. Many other data types are supported. In fact, developers can
even add their own data types by writing Cygnus
extensions.
Find Data Tab (Find Dialog Box)
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Finally, there is the Data tab for finding all other types of data. The
Data tab simply provides the same data entry as the Cygnus edit window
does: hexadecimal values on the left and ASCII values on the right. Simply
type any combination of hexadecimal and ASCII bytes to search for that
string of bytes.
Replace Dialog Box
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The Replace dialog box provides even more flexibility than the Find
dialog box. The Replace dialog box provides three find tabs in addition to
three replace tabs. Any of the three find tabs can be used to specify the
data you want to search for. And you can independently use any of the
three replace tabs to specify what that data should be replaced with.
This allows for unprecedented flexibility when performing Replace
operations. While you would normally replace data with values of the same
data type, you are by no means limited to that. If you wanted, for
example, to replace all instances of a particular float value with a
SYSTEMTIME value, you could do so very easily.
Bookmarks Dialog Box
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Another way to locate data is by using bookmarks. Bookmarks allow you
to define one or more ranges of data. Bookmarks are particularly useful
when working with different files that contain data at the same locations.
A bookmark collection can be applied to multiple files and can be given
meaningful names. This makes it easy to jump to predefined points within
those files.
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