Ethereal-dev: Re: Fw: [ethereal-dev] Using Ethereal to measure application performance
Hello!
On Mon, Jul 17, 2000 at 11:21:57PM +0900, Richard Sharpe wrote:
...
> I am now working on an XML-based description language for another Ethereal
> project I am working on. This language should allow me to describe a
> protocol and then generate code from it to decode the protocol. It could
> also be used for other things, perhaps like what you want.
>
> I propose to use Perl initially, because it has an XML parsing module and I
> can work in Perl and generate C code from Perl.
>
> In a couple of days (like this week or next), I guess I could post some
> comments about where I am up to on this.
>
> I would welcome any additional input.
I'm currently working on a similar project for decding (and encoding) of
binary file formats. The goal is not only to decode files (into some kind of
description language, like tethereal output) but also parse the decoded text
files back and recreate the identical binary file.
I need this for LMPC (Little Movie Processing Centre), my tool to decode
game demo files (for the Quake series).
I started also with a format description in XML but tried to create a
readable documentation (SGML for further text processing) and the
decode/encode source with XSL. XSL seems to be a bit restricted in
comparison to Perl but for my goal it was enough. The very first version was
also Perl but I found more and repetition in the Perl code (like the check for
the existence of a attribute in an element or similar things), which I could
describe more easily with XSL.
BTW, does anyone know, if there are tools for BFF (Binary File Format
Definition, search for BFF on http://www.wotsit.org). BFF would be a good
starting point for this kind of project.
Uwe Girlich
