File-format analysis tools for archivists

Posted May 26, 2016 14:57 UTC (Thu) by oever (guest, #987)
Parent article: File-format analysis tools for archivists

File formats are a very interesting topic. While working on Microsoft Office import filters for Calligra, I wrote a small grammar for writing file format schemas. From that one can generate (de)serialization code for those file formats. There is an effort to write such grammars for more file formats. That grammar is called Data Format Description Language (DFDL).

Writing grammars for file format is the best way of doing IO. Writing IO by hand is just silly. If a file format has a grammar, it's easier to support it in new software.