Hexdump of a string starting at new lines?

Question

Say I have a multi-line strings, but the entries on it are short; if I try to hexdump, then I get something like this:

echo "something
is
being
written
here" | hexdump -C

#00000000  73 6f 6d 65 74 68 69 6e  67 0a 69 73 0a 62 65 69  |something.is.bei|
#00000010  6e 67 0a 77 72 69 74 74  65 6e 0a 68 65 72 65 0a  |ng.written.here.|
#00000020

Most hex dump programs, including hexdump simply function as a 2D matrix (you can define how many bytes/column you're going to have per line); and so in this case, the entire output is compacted on two lines of dump.

Is there a program that I can use, which would keep going as usual - except when it encounters a new line (0x0a - but possibly any other character, or seqence thereof), it would also start a new line? In this case, I'd imagine an output like:

00000000  73 6f 6d 65 74 68 69 6e  67 0a                    |something.|
0000000a  69 73 0a                                          |is.|
0000000d  62 65 69 6e 67 0a                                 |being.|
00000013  77 72 69 74 74 65 6e 0a                           |written.|
0000001b  68 65 72 65 0a                                    |here.|
00000020

Solution

Here is one possibility, a compact solution which is making use of read's capability to restrict the amount of read characters:

c=0
while IFS= read -n16 -r line
do
  len=${#line}
  ((len<16)) && { ((len++)) ; line+=$'\n' ;}
  printf "%08x  " $c
  for ((i=0; i<len; i++))
  do  printf " %02x" "'${line:i:1}"
  done
  printf " %*s %s\n" $((50-3*len)) "" "'${line//[^[:print:]]/.}'"
  ((c+=len))
done

Comments

[Janis]

Does no answer fit your needs? - What's missing for you?

[trs]

I would have loved to upvote your answer because it's awesome. But 3 years on it doesn't quite work. Sample file content per hexdump: 01 0c 02 98 00 01 97 be 0a 16 00 00 Output of your function: 00 01 0c 02 7ffe 01 7ffe 7ffe 0a