Inspecting a CBOR file from the command line

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1

To inspect the contents of a CBOR file, use xxd -p filename to print a hex dump of the file, and pipe that to cbor-diag.

xxd -p pull-full.cbor | cbor-diag
{
    "rs": ["a", "b", "c"],
    "bk": 6,
    "bb": h'240804404944140040810c0420c90020',
}

xxd comes with macOS by default. cbor-diag comes from the cbor-diag-cli Rust crate, which must be installed first using cargo install cbor-diag-cli.

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For all the JS/TS developers out there, what I’ve been doing so far was using the cborg and uint8arrays library in node:

$ node
> u = require("uint8arrays")
> cbor = require("cborg")
> cbor.decode(u.fromString("a263616765187b6568656c6c6f65776f726c64", "hex"))
{ age: 123, hello: 'world' }

You can also use @ipld/dag-cbor in place of cborg for CID support.

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And finally, for the lazy ones that can’t be bothered by typing things into the terminal, you can use this link.
https://cbor.nemo157.com/