Binary File Parsing

[James Basller]

Hi All,

I have one binary file (.dat). I have to parse that file. So, can anyone suggest me how I can achieve this?

Is there any 3rd party API available like for XML I am using VTD-XML parsing ?

Thanks!!!

[Ulf Dittmer]

I'm not sure what the connection to XML might be, but if you don't have a library that can handle whatever format the file has, you'll need to write a parser based on the java.io classes (like FileInputStream).

[William Brogden]

What information do you have on the structure of the data? What generates your .dat file?

Bill

[James Basller]

William Brogden wrote:What information do you have on the structure of the data? What generates your .dat file?

Bill

binary files are coming from the hardware device. I have a file named xyz.dat which contains lines like below

00000000h: 76 04 00 01 00 FF 0F 11 FF 09 07 03 15 ; v....

this is a kind of lines in my file above is not complete line

can anyone suggest how can I parse this kind of files???

Thanks!!!

[Jesper de Jong]

As Ulf suggested, you can read the contents of a binary file using FileInputStream. What you should then do with the bytes that you read, entirely depends on what the format of the file is and what your program needs to do with it. Without knowing what the bytes in the file mean, you can't do anything useful with it and nobody can tell you. You should lookup documentation of the device to find out what the format of the file is.

[William Brogden]

When parsing a byte[] remember that any operation looking at a byte is going to automatically promote the value to a signed int so your FF byte will become -1.

Therefore, use a bitwise mask with 0xFF before checking the value.

Bill