Show HN: Cbor.app – CBOR encoder/decoder with hex visualization

2 points by 0xcb0 9 hours ago

Author here: I built this because I wanted to learn about CBOR and how it's build and how it encodes data. I work with it on a almost daily basis, its s binary format that is defined in the RFC8949 specification.

It was my first time using AI to formalize the rules from an RFC and turn them into testable, working code. That's why I also explicitly say that this tool is not currently in use for production (I'm sure it will contain bugs!), it's just like a tinkering tool for me and at one point I hope to make this into something that people can maybe even use in their production system.

For visualization, I built a hex viewer that shows how the CBOR is decoded. It's really helping me understand the format better.

Right now it's just a basic version—you can encode, decode, and diff two CBOR values. There's still a lot of work to do. I'd like to add more educational content about what CBOR actually is and offer more tools.

I work in the Cardano space where CBOR is used heavily, so one thing I want to add is a function that can recognize which Cardano era a transaction (or part of a transaction) comes from.

There is still a ton of work to do and I have more ideas in mind, but for now that's my first version and I would like to get some feedback :)

The CBOR parser for that project is already open sourced, and I also built a small test suite to validate my CBOR parser against test cases and see how I compare to different parsers. That's why I created two projects that make this app possible. They are both linked in the about page and they're called Nachos and Taco.