It sure seems very interesting. Can U please send the first 2048 bytes of the document? We can go thru it and may be device some form of record segregation.
However, if the record is encoded with a very complex Syntax, the decoding might as well be a nightmare. regards, Sathya Narayanan S RPG Cellular Services Ltd. GSM : + 91 98410 48051 > -----Original Message----- > From: SADANAMI Keishi [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > Sent: Saturday, December 22, 2001 12:39 AM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: [ASN.1] Reverse Engineering > > Hello all, > > I'm a bioinformatics student currently creating small in-house > protein-ligand database. I'm very new to ASN, (started a few days > ago) and facing practical problems with it right now. > > I have to extract information from ASCII-encoded ASN.1 datafile > which I have received from a certain obsolete biological database. > Unfortunately, I couldn't get any ASN.1 specification of this database, > though I had tried every possible means. So I'm considering > reverse-engineer ASN.1 definition from the ASCII-decoded ASN.1 data. > > 1) I assume I can accomplish this by trial and error: First presume > certain ASN.1 definition, judging from instances of the database, then > make a parser. If the parsing fails, modify previous definition, create > a new parser, and so on. Are there better ways to automate these tasks? > The number of instances in this database is about 50,000. > > 2) There seems to be many ASN.1 compilers which can encode/decode data > as a binary stream like BER, but I couldn't find ASCII decoder(parser). > Is it just a matter of using tools like yacc when it comes to decoding > *ASCII* data of ASN.1, or are there any such tools publicly available > on the web? (so that I would rather not re-invent the wheel.) > > Sorry if these questions aren't appropriate for this list. > > Regards, > > Keishi
