ZahirScan: Template-Based Content Compression & Metadata Extraction

"Others will dream that I am mad, while I dream of the Zahir." — JL Borges, Labyrinths

A high-performance Rust CLI that uses probabilistic template mining to extract structure and patterns from content, and metadata for the formats below.

Supported formats:

• Logs: Plain text logs, JSON-formatted logs, structured log files
• Text Documents: TXT, Markdown (MD), plain text content
• Documents: DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, PDF, EPUB
• Databases: SQLite (.db, .sqlite, .sqlite3)
• Settings: INI (.ini, .cfg), TOML (.toml, .lock), YAML (.yaml, .yml), XML (.xml)
• Structured: CSV, HTML (.html, .htm)
• Archives: ZIP (.zip); TAR and compressed TAR (.tar, .tar.gz, .tgz, .tar.bz2, .tar.xz).
• Code/Scripts: Detected via linguist (e.g. .py, .rs, .js, .ts, .sh, Makefile, Dockerfile).
• Images: JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, BMP, TIFF
• Videos: MP4, MKV, AVI, MOV, WMV, FLV, WebM, M4V, 3GP, OGV
• Audio: MP3, FLAC, WAV, M4A, AAC, OGG, Opus, WMA, APE, DSD, DSF

Key Features

• Template mining: Repeated patterns in logs/text → templates with placeholders
• Memory-mapped I/O: memmap2; single open per path
• Adaptive parallelization: Chunk sizes and workers tuned from Phase 1 stats
• Size reduction: Typically 80–95% smaller than raw while preserving structure and metadata

Metadata extraction by format

Installation

cargo add zahirscan        # library
cargo install zahirscan    # CLI

ffprobe (FFmpeg) is optional and required for video/audio metadata.

Usage

CLI

$ zahirscan --help
Template mining for text/logs and metadata extraction for media, documents, archives, and more

Usage: zahirscan [OPTIONS] [COMMAND]

Commands:
  init  Write default config to XDG config dir (~/.config/zahirscan/zahirscan.toml or equivalent)
  help  Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

Options:
  -i, --input <INPUT>...  Input file(s) to parse (can specify multiple)
  -o, --output <OUTPUT>   Output folder path (defaults to temp file if not specified). Creates filename.zahirscan.out in the folder for each input file
  -f, --full              Output mode: full metadata (for development/debugging). Default is templates-only mode (minimal JSON with templates & writing footprint)
  -d, --dev               Development mode: enables debug logging. Default is production mode (info level only). This disables progress bars if enabled
  -r, --redact            Redact file paths in output (show only filename as ***/filename.ext). Useful for privacy when sharing output JSON
  -n, --no-media          Skip media metadata extraction (audio, video, image). Faster processing when metadata is not needed
  -p, --progress          Show progress bars during processing. This is ignored if dev mode is enabled
  -h, --help              Print help
  -V, --version           Print version

Output formats:

• Mode 1 (Templates): Minimal JSON with template patterns & schema, writing footprint (for text/markdown), media metadata (for images/videos/audio), code metadata (for code/script files), and document metadata (for DOCX/XLSX/PPTX)
• Mode 2 (Full): Mode 1 output plus:
  • File statistics (size, line count, processing time)
  • Size comparison (before/after)

Library Usage

ZahirScan can be used as a Rust library to extract schemas (templates and metadata) from files programmatically.

use zahirscan::{extract_zahir, OutputMode, RuntimeConfig};

// Default config, no file write
let result = extract_zahir("file.log", OutputMode::Full, None, None, None)?;
// result.outputs, result.phase1_failed, result.phase2_failed

// With callback: pass Some(&|out: Output| { ... }) as 5th argument.
// Streaming input: extract_zahir_from_stream(rx, OutputMode::Full, None, None, None).

Inputs: single path (&str, String) or multiple (&[&str], Vec<String>, etc.). Full API, ZahirScanResult, Output, Template, WritingFootprint, and per-format metadata: docs.rs.

Configuration

• CLI: Embedded default (config.toml), merged with a user config in the app data dir if present. Only keys in the user file override.
  • User config path: Unix ~/.config/zahirscan/zahirscan.toml (or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/zahirscan/zahirscan.toml), Windows %APPDATA%\zahirscan\zahirscan.toml.
  • Run zahirscan init to write the embedded default to edit; the CLI will use it as the overlay.
• Library: extract_zahir(..., config: None, output_dir: None) uses the embedded default only (no overlay). For custom config pass Some(&config); RuntimeConfig::new() is the embedded default (no file I/O). Overlay is only used by the CLI via setup::load_config().

Full schema: config.toml.

Adaptive defaults:

• max_workers = 0 uses a sensible default based on CPU cores
• Phase 2 uses adaptive chunking based on Phase 1 file statistics (count/bytes/variance) and targets a neat multiple of max_workers
• No manual batching configuration is required for typical workloads

File filtering ([filter]):

• ignore_patterns: skip files whose basename matches (exact: .DS_Store, Thumbs.db; suffix: *.swp, *~; prefix: prefix*)
• ignore_hidden_files = true: skip Unix hidden files (basename starts with .)

Architecture

Phase 1: Format detection, stats (lines/bytes/tokens), mmap for text, content-type classification.

Phase 2: Metadata extraction per format, template mining, writing footprint (exact-pattern then shape fallback for text/markdown), single Rayon pool with adaptive chunk sizing.

Security

Read-only, non-invasive: path sanitization, existence checks, no source modification.

License

Dual-licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0.