Are there any Java Frameworks for binary file parsing?

java parsing file-io binary-data
Kosi2801 picture Kosi2801 · Mar 13, 2009 · Viewed 11k times · Source

My problem is, that I want to parse binary files of different types with a generic parser which is implemented in JAVA. Maybe describing the file format with a configuration file which is read by the parser or creating Java classes which parse the files according to some sort of parsing rules.

I have searched quite a bit on the internet but found almost nothing on this topic.

What I have found are just things which deal with compiler-generators (Jay, Cojen, etc.) but I don't think that I can use them to generate something for parsing binary files. But I could be wrong on that assumption.

Are there any frameworks which deal especially with easy parsing of binary files or can anyone give me a hint how I could use parser/compiler-generators to do so?

Update: I'm looking for something where I can write a config-file like

file:
  header: FIXED("MAGIC")
  body: content(10)

content:
  value1: BYTE
  value2: LONG
  value3: STRING(10)

and it generates automatically something which parses files which start with "MAGIC", followed by ten times the content-package (which itself consists of a byte, a long and a 10-byte string).

Update2: I found something comparable what I'm looking for, "Construct", but sadly this is a Python-Framework. Maybe this helps someone to get an idea, what I'm looking for.

Answer

Wilfred Springer picture Wilfred Springer · Jul 10, 2009

Using Preon:

public class File {

  @BoundString(match="MAGIC")
  private String header;

  @BoundList(size="10", type=Body.class)
  private List<Body> body;

  private static class Body {

    @Bound
    byte value1;

    @Bound
    long value2;

    @BoundString(size="10")
    String value3;

  }


}

Decoding data:

Codec<File> codec = Codecs.create(File.class);
File file = codecs.decode(codec, buffer);

Let me know if you are running into problems.

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