Description

Header-only library conforming to C99.

The main idea behind fformat is to combine the code for loading and saving of a file format into one function, which also serves as the definition of the format.

To achieve this, all provided functions receive a mode (load or save) that switches their behaviour between reading and writing files.

Example

#define FFORMAT_IMPL
#include "fformat.h"

bool friendly_file_io(FF_MODE mode, int32_t *number, char *path){

    FILE *file = ff_open(path, mode);
    if (!file) return false;

    // Definiton of file format. (This layout supports easy copy pasting of lines)
    bool success = true
    && ff_lit_string(file, mode, "Hello, I am a friendly file!\n") // write or assert strings
    && ff_lit_string(file, mode, "can we be friends?? <.<\n")
    && ff_lit_string(file, mode, "here's my number: \"")
    && ff_var_bytes(file, mode, number, sizeof(*number)) // read or write data
    && ff_lit_string(file, mode, "\" uwu\n")
    ;

    // remember to close the file.
    fclose(file);
    return success;
}

use make to build the example programs (or compile them yourself, they are only 1 c-file each, no dependencies).

Features

• declarative file format through function statements.

• unification of save & load user code

• supports:

  • String literals (boilerplate text)
  • variable and array R/W (i.e. bytes)
  • string R/W (NULL-terminated bytes)
  • in-file terminated strings

Anti-Features

• pattern matching
• schemas

User Guide

See the description in fformat.h for more details.

Function names

• The function names are a composition of different keywords:
• prefix: lit_ functions assert that their data exists in the file. var_ functions save/load data from/to the var pointer.
• content: string means, that the byte array is NULL-terminated in working memory (not necessarily in file). It is a convenience variant of bytes, which is not NULL-terminated.
• All functions have an _alloc variant that allocates memory on load. (allocator can be overwritten)
• Some Functions are slower than others:
  • Seeking functions like _until are usually slower than saving the size in the file format explicitly.
  • Parsing functions (if they exist yet) are also slow.
  • These functions only exist to improve human readability and to make things prettier to look at.