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File Documentor

What is it?

Have you ever needed to get at a piece of meta data within a binary file? Needed to know what resolution the png file was saved at? The dimensions of that tiff file? The methods of this class file?

Rather than opening up each file in its own application and hunting around the interface to find what you want you could use the File Documentor (well once it's finished).

The idea is simple. Using an xml schema you can describe the contents of a binary file as blocks containing items of data. By adding some simple logic (optional, select, loop) you can give an Interpreter enough information about how the data is stored in the file so that it can extract the information for you and present it in any way you like.

Where have you got to?

So far I have written a basic Interpreter that holds a collection of these xml files. A binary file can be passed to the Interpreter and it can extract the data from the file and create an output xml file of the results.

Eventually I'll build on a GUI and write an XSL to transform the output xml file into other formats.

What does it need?

The File Documentor relys on a number of third-party, open source libraries:

How can I get a version of File Documentor?

No files have yet been release for this project but you can view the work in progress by accessing the CVS repository. Hopefully I can get an initial release by the end of May 2004.