libbpf: Add support for printing BTF character arrays as strings
The BTF dumper code currently displays arrays of characters as just that -
arrays, with each character formatted individually. Sometimes this is what
makes sense, but it's nice to be able to treat that array as a string.
This change adds a special case to the btf_dump functionality to allow
0-terminated arrays of single-byte integer values to be printed as
character strings. Characters for which isprint() returns false are
printed as hex-escaped values. This is enabled when the new ".emit_strings"
is set to 1 in the btf_dump_type_data_opts structure.
As an example, here's what it looks like to dump the string "hello" using
a few different field values for btf_dump_type_data_opts (.compact = 1):
- .emit_strings = 0, .skip_names = 0: (char[6])['h','e','l','l','o',]
- .emit_strings = 0, .skip_names = 1: ['h','e','l','l','o',]
- .emit_strings = 1, .skip_names = 0: (char[6])"hello"
- .emit_strings = 1, .skip_names = 1: "hello"
Here's the string "h\xff", dumped with .compact = 1 and .skip_names = 1:
- .emit_strings = 0: ['h',-1,]
- .emit_strings = 1: "h\xff"
Signed-off-by: Blake Jones <blakejones@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrii Nakryiko <andrii@kernel.org>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/20250603203701.520541-1-blakejones@google.com
2 files changed
