Getting Started

Spiff needs for you to have three things - a binary file to parse, a description of the file format, and some classes that will ultimately represent the contents of the file.

File formats are described in an .adf file (adf = Arbitrary Data Format). The formal grammar of the file is described in AdfGrammar. The .adf extension is a convention rather than a necessity.

The most basic things you can do are to specify a list of datatypes, in the order in which they occur in the file, followed by a name to give to that field. The primitive datatypes map directly to Java primitives:

byte (1 byte) short (2 bytes) int (4 bytes) long (8 bytes) double (4 bytes) float (8 bytes)

There are also unsigned equivalents for integers:

ubyte ushort uint ulong

For instance, the file header of a bitmap file looks like this:

short bfType int bfSize short bfReserved1 short bfReserved2 int bfOffBits