Wednesday 30 May 2007

Goodbye PZFileReader! Hello FlatPack!

Paul and I have been muling (pun intended... more on that later!) about the name of our parser project. PZFileReader is very useful and originated in the world of "reading files", its capabilities have outgrown the name for quite some time.

We then thought about the basics, what does this project do?

Well, it parses files, string or messages that are in a delimited format (e.g. csv) or fixed length format (when a field is delimited by an offset and a length). It would even support parsing records that are across multiple lines. Furthermore, the project allowed an XML definition of a given format... Some work is also ongoing to create 'Writers' that would allow you to create such delimited, we hope to reveal more shortly.

And so.. enter FlatPack!

The common denominator of those files/messages is that they are "flat" and not hierarchical a la xml.

We were lucky enough to get the url: http://flatpack.sf.net

The packaging and website will be updated soon!

Enjoy!


Benoit & Paul