Objective-C Encoding Parser

This library is a simple parser for Objective-C type encoding with a focus on cross-platform.

See parser.h for the provided APIs and run-test.c to learn how this library works in action.

Features

• Simple and intuitive APIs, ready for use without reading any documents.
• Zero-dependency and platform-agnostic, tested in macOS, Linux and Windows, easy to integrate with your various analysis facilities.
• Full support of the type encoding syntax (including struct, union), and able to get the related information of the type (like name, size and alignment).
• Error tolerance for ill-formed encoding strings, the library parses inputs in its best effort.
• Built-in dump function to print the human-readable string describing the type.

Building

Make

git clone https://github.com/unixzii/objc-encodingparser.git
cd objc-encodingparser
make

This will generate both the static library libocep.a and a run-test program.

Xcode / Visual Studio

The project (solution) both contains two targets: libocep and RunTest. Once build is succeeded, you can retrieve the products from your IDE's build directory.

Type Node Explained

ocep_type_node_t is the core structure of this library, you parse an encoding string and get the result with that type. It's like an n-ary tree and each node has a parent pointer, a child pointer and a sibling pointer. An example is shown as the below figure:

You can use ocep_type_node_traverse function to visit all the children (include itself) of a given node in a DFS-fashion traverse.

Limitations

• Bit fields are currently not supported (since it's rare in Objective-C code), submit an issue if you see this important.
• Type size is now calculated in the compact layout (eg. "{?=c^vc}" will get a size of 16 while actually it's 24).

License

This project is licensed under MIT license.