The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5) - Building Different File Viewer

Building Different File Viewer

What's the best language for developing
file viewers :

IE : I want to be able view the value in a file
which is in position 455 and has a lengh of 15 (it's an amount) and another field which is in the file, let's call
it description, it's located at position 500 and has a lengh of 50

Basically I've to write about 30 of those file viewer (various file format some CSV other tab delimited)which enables you to view and changes the value if required.

A friend of mine has told me to try Perl, it's great
for processing files and string, can anyone confirm ?

RasterBurner
Sunday, December 7, 2003

C, C++, Perl, VB, C#, VB.NET, JAVA, Delphi... basically you name it, it can do it. What language do you know the best? Use that if you can.

Sunday, December 7, 2003

Also, don't write them by hand. You could either write a "generic" file viewer that uses a configuration file to describe the file to be viewed/edited or generate specific file viewers from configuration files that describe the file. If you're going to generate the code I'd recommend using xml for the config files as you can then use xslt for the generation. If you're going to produce a generic viewer then the format of the config file is up to you (I'd probably still use xml as you don't have to write a config file parser then).

Personally I wouldn't pick perl as the biggest labour you're going to face is the gui, and perl, though it has some gui builders, wouldn't be my choice.

Alex
Sunday, December 7, 2003

Tcl/Tk

Phil
Sunday, December 7, 2003

A decently featured hex-editor type program should already have all the features you need. You shouldn't have to write anything.

If you do go and program a solution, make sure you differentiate between opening files as text, and as binary when required.

Gordon Hartley
Monday, December 8, 2003

Sounds like strange requirements. And you don't tell us about the environment.
If I had the choice, I would probably write it in python, but...

GP
Monday, December 8, 2003