Re: [bug-gawk] enhancement: fixed-width record

[Andrew J. Schorr]

Hi,

On Fri, Sep 20, 2019 at 08:28:30PM +0800, jamesfengcao via bug-gawk wrote:
>   It appears not too complicated to add fixed-width record support. With this 
> support, the GNU awk can be used to handle most cases of binary files.
> 
>   One such case is to handling binary files with strings mixed with binary 
> data. Usually these binary data are fixed-width. We can easily split the file 
> to text file with strings and pure binary file using tools like bbe. Using 
> gawk with fixed-width record support, we can easily sort the original mixed 
> binary file.
> 
>   In fact, with this enhancement, gawk is automatically extended to be a very 
> powerful tool for binary data processing. In fact, it can handle almost all 
> cases. And the best thing is that it is almost free.

I think this can implemented as a gawk extension library that registers an
input parser. The documentation is here:

https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Input-Parsers.html

If you develop such an extension, please consider contributing it
to the gawkextlib project.

Regards,
Andy