Reading complex binary file formats

Is there any book or tutorial that can learn me how to read binary files with a complex structure. I did a lot of attempts to make a program t开发者_如何转开发hat has to read a complex file format and save it in a struct. But it always failed because of heap overruns etc. that made the program crash.

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Probably your best bet is to look for information on binary network protocols rather than file formats. The main issues (byte order, structure packing, serializing and unserializing pointers, ...) are the same but networking people tend to be more aware of the issues and more explicit in how they are handled. Reading and writing a blob of binary to or from a wire really isn't much different than dealing with binary blobs on disk.

You could also find a lot of existing examples in open source graphics packages (such as netpbm or The Gimp). An open source office package (such as LibreOffice) would also give you lots of example code that deals with complex and convoluted binary formats.

There might even be something of use for you in Google's Protocol Buffers or old-school ONC RPC and XDR.

I don't know any books or manuals on such things but maybe a bunch of real life working examples will be more useful to you than a HOWTO guide.

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One of the best tools to debug memory access problems is valgrind. I'd give that a try next time. As for books, you'd need to be more specific about what formats you want to parse. There are lots of formats and many of them are radically different from each other.

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Check out Flavor. It allows you to specify the format using C-like structure and will auto-generate the parser for the data in C++ or Java.