nom VS Kaitai Struct

Just in case you are not familiar with nom, it is a parser combinator written in Rust. The most basic thing you can do with it is import one of its parsing functions, give it some byte or string input and then get a Result as output with the parsed value and the rest of the input or an error if the parser failed. tag for example is used to recognize literal character/byte sequences.

I may be the only one not familiar, but nom refers to https://github.com/rust-bakery/nom which looks like a pretty handy way to parse binary data in Rust.

Lots of people use nom for their parsing needs, but that's not the only game in town and there other options.

As much as I love nom as well as other parser combinator libraries, regex-based parsers, BNF/EBNF-based parsers, etc. I always end up going back to plain old text-based char-by-char scanners.

I am using nom / nom_locate to build the parser side because I've done a handful of other projects with it, and I plan to use tower-lsp to hook up the language server side.

Look into a parsing library such as https://github.com/rust-bakery/nom

If we were in /r/learnrust I'd have recommended the nom crate for this.

Thanks to the flexibility of [nom](https://github.com/rust-bakery/nom), it is very easy to write your own parser in rust, read [this article](https://github.com/metaworm/luac-parser-rs/wiki/Write-custom-luac-parser) to learn how to write a luac parser

I've been working on an assembler and right now it uses nom. While nom isn't great for error messages, good error messages will be important for this particular assembler (current code), so I've been attempting to use the methods described by Eyal Kalderon in Error recovery with parser combinators (using nom).

- ImHex [2], which has a pattern language [3] which allows parsing, and it seems more powerful than what Kaitai offers. I stumbled upon some limitations with it but it was still useful.

[1]: https://kaitai.io/

Beautiful. Didn't know something like this exists. Reminds me of Katai[0]

[0]. https://kaitai.io/

An EDID override like this would be helpful for macOS as well, where the monitors swapping around after standby is a real annoyance [0] [1]

EDID rewrites are 99% of the time blocked by the monitor firmware: https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/Decoding-monitor-EDID-on-macO...

By the way, one helpful tool that helped me navigate the EDID dump was Kaitai Struct [2]. It shows a side by side view with the hex view and the EDID structure, and it highlights the hex values in real time as you navigate the structure. Unfortunately [3] it doesn't support the extension blocks that the author needs.

[0] https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/Weird-monitor-bugs

[1] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/external-displays-swapp...

[2] https://kaitai.io/

[3] https://github.com/kaitai-io/edid.ksy

Kaitai Struct might be a good choice for that: https://kaitai.io/

For binary log format, there's the excellent Kaitai Struct frameworks, that make it very easy to generate parsers from a declarative schema

kaitai

https://kaitai.io/

Worth a look if you are writing binary parsers.