Read messages from kafka topic

[#1]

Is there CLI support to read last N messages from Kafka topic or to read message at a particular offset ?

The log file generated for the topic has unrecognizable characters .When I tried to tail last message from the file , it listed many messages.

Or is it possible to read messages sent to topic in the specified time range ?

The only work around I found is to grep UTF-8 characters into a file :

cat 00000000000000000000.log | strings -n 8 > kafka_topic.txt

[#2 · Accepted solution]

You can read messages to the console from a particular offset using the Simple Consumer CLI:

https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/System+Tools

Search for Simple Consumer.