Library for parsing binary structures

[Dan Sommers]

On 3/29/19 12:13 PM, Peter J. Holzer wrote:

> Obviously you need some way to describe the specific binary format you
> want to parse - in other words, a grammar. The library could then use
> the grammar to parse the input - either by interpreting it directly, or
> by generating (Python) code from it. The latter has the advantage that
> it has to be done only once, not every time you want to parse a file.
> 
> If that sounds familiar, it's what yacc does. Except that it does it for
> text files, not binary files. I am not aware of any generic binary
> parser generator for Python. I have read research papers about such
> generators for (I think) C and Java, but I don't remember the names and
> I'm not sure if the generators got beyond the proof of concept stage.

It's been a while since I've used those tools, but if you
create a lexer (the yylex() function) that can tokenize a
binary stream, then yacc won't know the difference.