Display Special Chars (TCPSampler usecase)

[Darren Hartford <bi...@yahoo.com>]

Just sharing my research to date just in case I getting distracted with other things and is of interest to others, the usecase below has come up often as a challenge -

Desire is to be able to display special characters, specifically those such as Serial Control codes often used with TCP work  (SOH, STX, etc...).   An example is how Notepad++ shows these characters, although that is not required but would be nice.  

Initial review, focusing on TCPSampler (TCPConfigGui) and View Results Tree (request and response RAW panes).  Jmeter is AWT based.

org.apache.jmeter.protocol.tcp.config.gui.TcpConfigGui.requestData ->
org.apache.jmeter.gui.util.JSyntaxTextArea ->
org.fife.ui.rsyntaxtextarea.RSyntaxTextArea

Reviewing RSyntaxTextArea, it is more ide-style editor, does not appear to have different encoding options for rendering these special characters.  Should either enhance/start there, or replace with an alternative (a quick search ended with a failed google-fu of AWT alternatives).

-D