Split/explode a multibyte binary into individual bytes #14891
Description
Question
Is there an idiomatic way to turn a multibyte binary into a list<binary> or list<int> composed of many single-byte elements? Are there plans for each to support extracting bytes from binary in the future?
Additional context and details
I am working with binary files in Nushell. I want to iterate over the individual bytes to collect some statistics over them, but I have found no easy way to perform the iteration.
each command treats a binary as a whole, multibyte stream:
> open test.bin --raw | into binary
Length: unknown (stream) | printable whitespace ascii_other non_ascii
00000000: 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 aa bb cc dd ee ff 0••••••••_××××××
> open test.bin --raw | into binary | each { |e| $e | into int | echo }
Error: nu::shell::eval_block_with_input
× Eval block failed with pipeline input
╭─[entry #31:1:1]
1 │ open test.bin --raw | into binary | each { |e| $e | into int | echo }
· ──┬─
· ╰── source value
╰────
Error: nu::shell::incorrect_value
× Incorrect value.
╭─[entry #31:1:48]
1 │ open test.bin --raw | into binary | each { |e| $e | into int | echo }
· ─┬ ────┬───
· │ ╰── encountered here
· ╰── binary input is too large to convert to int (16 bytes)
╰────
> open test.bin --raw | into binary | each { |e| echo $e }
╭───┬──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│ 0 │ [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 170, 187, 204, 221, 238, 255] │
╰───┴──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯
D:\Workspace\hgame2025\compress.nu>
bytes collect concatenates fragments of multibyte binarys and makes it a single stream, yet no inverses of this command are documented.
I know the effect could be achieved using 0..(($stream | length) - 1) | each { |i| $stream | bytes at $i..$i | into int } as a workaround:
> 0..(($stream | length) - 1) | each { |i| $stream | bytes at $i..$i | into int }
╭────┬─────╮
│ 0 │ 0 │
│ 1 │ 1 │
│ 2 │ 2 │
│ 3 │ 3 │
│ 4 │ 4 │
│ 5 │ 5 │
│ 6 │ 6 │
│ 7 │ 7 │
│ 8 │ 8 │
│ 9 │ 9 │
│ 10 │ 170 │
│ 11 │ 187 │
│ 12 │ 204 │
│ 13 │ 221 │
│ 14 │ 238 │
│ 15 │ 255 │
╰────┴─────╯
However, it would be better to pipeline it if the temporary $stream could be eliminated. May each support this feature in the future?