Thanks Stephen,
On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 2:53 PM, Stephen Tetley
I'd use a parser combinator library that has word8 word16, word32 combinators. The latter should really have big and little endian versions word16be, word16le, word32be, word32le.
Data.Binary should provide this and Attoparsec I think. Usually I roll my own, but only because I had my own libraries before these two existed.
The idiom of a tag byte telling you what comes next is very common in binary formats. It means parsers can avoid backtracking altogether.
I'll take a look at attoparsec I was also trying to understand how I could do it myself also - Basically I've been using the Get Monad for getting out the word/8/16 etc out of a ByteStream - but I dont want to write a separate parsing routine for each command. So instead of doing something like this - parseCommand1 byteStream = runGet $ do b1 <- getWord8 b2 <- getWord16be return (b1,b2) parseCommand2 byteStream = runGet $ do b1 <- getWord16be b2 <- getWord16be return (b1,b2) I'd like to do this parse byteStream command = runGet $ do map (commandFormat command) --- or something like this - not exactly sure about this. Regards, Kashyap