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Wireshark-users: Re: [Wireshark-users] Should the "export as text" item be in an "Export Human-re

From: Jaap Keuter <jaap.keuter@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2012 17:31:49 +0200
Hi list,

I can see the "Export / Import complementary" line of thinking (maybe I shouldn't have created the Import...). Anyways, this cannot end up in yet another top level menu, it's just not that sort of thing, it is a "File" operation. What could be done (and it already looks like it on !Windows, if I'm correct) is make it Print option. A print operation is less likely to be confused with something that can be re-imported (barring the guy feeding the printed output into the office printer/scanner to get PDFs, using OCR to get the text out, then trying to import this text).

Just my 2 cents, thanks,
Jaap


On 04/07/2012 06:05 AM, Guy Harris wrote:
The mistake that caused this question to be asked:

	http://ask.wireshark.org/questions/10000/how-to-get-the-txt-file-back-to-wireshark

might be due to people thinking that the result of an "Export" operation is something that contains the raw data from the packets and thus can be read into Wireshark.  (The question itself appears to have hoped that, even if it couldn't be read into Wireshark, it still contained the raw data, which, in this case, it didn't.)

Perhaps we should put the Export menu items for "as text" and "as PostScript" under a top-level menu item that more clearly indicates that the result of the operation will not be readable by Wireshark and can't necessarily even be converted into something readable by Wireshark?

The same applies for the "export as CSV" and "export as XML" operations; those aren't easily human-readable, but they're written in a form intended for programs *NOT* interested in the raw packet data (and not equipped to parse raw packet data) to process.