c_iff - a portable IFF parser

Contents

Introduction

c_iff is a portable IFF parser library written entirely in simple C. With this library you can read and write IFFs in an easy way. It is inspired by the Amigas own iffparse.library, but without its esotheric behaviour.

Background

IFF - Interchange File Format is the Amigas way to store data in a generic form. An IFF can contain nearly every type of data you can imagine, e.g. pictures (ILBM), animations (ANIM), sounds (AIFF), text (FTXT) or all of this in one file. This file can also contain Meta-information like the authors name or a version-strings. In the PC-world the name IFF is wrongly attached to the IFF-subtype ILBM, a picture-format.

Portability

c_iff is written in clean ANSI-C. It uses only simple functions from <stdlib.h> and <stdio.h> . So it should be portable to anything, a C-compiler exists for. I have tested it on the following machines: You see, it runs on Big and Little Endian machines. IFFs are stored in Big Endian order. To write portable code you must swap the bytes of multibyte numbers before you write them to an IFF or after you read them from an IFF. c_iff provides the two macros Swap16IfLE and Swap32IfLE to do this. If you are on a Big Endian machine you might have to add your machine to c_iff.h 64-bit machines (and 16-bit machines) are now supported too. Never use your machines (unsigned) char, short, int, long numbers if you deal with IFFs. Instead use the CARDXX and INTXX definitions from c_iff.h .

Installation

There is no configure and such things, just a simple Makefile. This should be usable for any unixoid system, that has cc, ar and ranlib. Just type "make" to build the statical library libc_iff.a . To build the documentation, type "make doc". This requieres perl installed. "make example" builds the example.

Documentation

c_iff has a build in documentation. This is generated by a "make doc" . This produces a file c_iff.txt . This file is in Amigas AutoDoc format, a simple ASCII-format. The file example.c shows how to use c_iff to read and write IFFs. The binary is build by "make example" .

Limitations

c_iff currently only supports FORM IFFs. But the other types of IFFs are very rare. If you need them, tell me.

Copyright and License

c_iff is Copyright (C) 2000, 2001 Joerg Dietrich 
This is the AROS-version of c_iff.
It is distributed under the AROS Public License.
But I reserve the right to distribute
my own version under other licenses.

Author

c_iff is written by me, Jörg Dietrich . You can reach me at Dietrich_Joerg@t-online.de.

Version History

06-Nov-2000 : initial release
11-Nov-2001 : bug-fixes, support for non 32-bit architectures

Copyright © 2000, 2001 Jörg Dietrich
Last change: 11-Nov-2001