Kaitai Struct - A new way to develop parsers for binary structures.

Reading and writing binary formats is hard, especially if it’s an interchange format that should work across a multitude of platforms and languages.

Have you ever found yourself writing repetitive, error-prone and hard-to-debug code that reads binary data structures from files or network streams and somehow represents them in memory for easier access?

Kaitai Struct tries to make this job easier — you only have to describe the binary format once and then everybody can use it from their programming languages — cross-language, cross-platform.

What is Kaitai Struct?

Kaitai Struct is a declarative language used to describe various binary data structures, laid out in files or in memory: i.e. binary file formats, network stream packet formats, etc.

The main idea is that a particular format is described in Kaitai Struct language (.ksy file) and then can be compiled with ksc into source files in one of the supported programming languages. These modules will include a generated code for a parser that can read the described data structure from a file or stream and give access to it in a nice, easy-to-comprehend API.

Links

http://kaitai.io/#what-is-it http://kaitai.io/news/2024/02/21/web-ide-improvements.html