[plug] Reading a horrible C file in PHP.

[Kirk Turner]

On 8/7/06, Shayne O'Neill <shayneo at bestflights.com.au> wrote:
>
> Ok. I've been tasked to convert this horrible C cgi to php.

>
> The stupid thing reads in a data file like this;-

...
>
> Nasty huh?
>


Its not exactly a nasty way - as more an efficient way - unless as you
have to read it in another language that doesn't support structs. Its
essentially just writing out memory for the struct directly in a form
of binary serialisation (you'll see this in many a C data function).

However that said it should be fairly straight forward in the way it
is handled looking at it (and a hexdump -C should reveal some of this
too). It should look something like this:

flightid - an int coming from 32 bytes (byte order and size will
depend on the platform)
name - the next 256 bytes, you'll need to search for the 0x00 byte
(NULL, or \0 character) and termiate the string there - how to convert
it into a php string you'll have to work out, php is not my strong
point.
price - next 128 bytes
description - next 65535 bytes
50x depature struct following the same process

and then repeat ad nauseum for each part.

You might find it easier to convert the data in C itself into a format
that is a bit more compatible with PHP (XML for example) or if you
need to have compatability between C and PHP write an extension in php
to load it (there might already be one that converts structs to php
classes for example?)

Kirk