Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by vg_head 906 days ago
My experience with parsing undocumented binary formats is with Skia's skp files. Unfortunately they don’t publish any docs regarding the format. Instead I relied on their source code (which is very convoluted), and in that process I discovered two tools which proved pretty useful:

- Kaitai [1], which takes as input a YAML file and can parse binary files based on it (and even generate parsers).

- ImHex [2], which has a pattern language [3] which allows parsing, and it seems more powerful than what Kaitai offers. I stumbled upon some limitations with it but it was still useful.

[1]: https://kaitai.io/

[2]: https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex

[3]: https://docs.werwolv.net/pattern-language/