tl;dr - I can’t seem to find any way to change the number of digits used when displaying hexadecimal format. Is there one?
I’m using both a custom HLA I developed myself and the built-in Simple Parallel analyzer.
In both cases, there are columns of analyzer output that I’d like formatted in hexadecimal. Unfortunately, selecting the hexadecimal radix results in numbers with a ridiculous amount of leading zeros (16 digits, enough for for 64 bits). This is accurately depicted in the documentation about choosing the hexadecimal radix (see here).
My data is at most 32 bits wide; many only 16; some only 4. So that’s anywhere from 8 to 14 completely useless 0s.
The same trouble might plague the Binary option as well; the documentation example implies it. I haven’t used that setting myself.
This comes down to the hexadecimal columns having to be expanded to fit the whole number (otherwise they display a right-truncated value, e.g., “0x000…”). That’s a big problem if I want to see a lot of columns at once.
Note that I’m using 2.4.29; the automatic installation process for the latest update isn’t working for some reason.
@baebiebrian Sorry about this limitation with our software! You are correct in that our pre-installed LLAs (like our Simple Parallel analyzer) do not currently have the option to truncate the leading zeros (image below as an example). You are also correct in that the fact we force displaying all leading zeros is overkill.
I’m guessing there might be a way to adjust this via a custom HLA (or at least a way to hack it to do so). Let me dig into this a bit.
Hi Tim,
Thanks for the engagement. Note that this same issue plagues the analyzer view “bubbles” as well; if the duration of a particular value is short, leading zeros easily cause the value to be unreadable:
In this example (simple parallel), the port is only 4 bits wide. I only need one hex character (and could do without the “0x”, although I recognize its utility).
Another improvement would be the option to right-justify when clipping values. So instead of seeing “0x0” (useless) I see “00F” (useful), for example.
@baebiebrian Agreed on all your points. I went ahead and added a comment to our existing feature request below for truncating hex results so we can record your need for this to be implemented.
One potential workaround (quite clunky though) could be to translate the hex results to strings so that they can be displayed however you like. This should ideally be fixed on our end, but it’s unfortunately not something we can prioritize working on at the moment.
