Reading and writing binary formats is hard, especially if it’s an interchange format that should work across a multitude of platforms and languages.

Have you ever found yourself writing repetitive, error-prone and hard-to-debug code that reads binary data structures from files or network streams and somehow represents them in memory for easier access?

Kaitai Struct tries to make this job easier — you only have to describe the binary format once and then everybody can use it from their programming languages — cross-language, cross-platform.

What is Kaitai Struct?

Kaitai Struct is a declarative language used to describe various binary data structures, laid out in files or in memory: i.e. binary file formats, network stream packet formats, etc.

The main idea is that a particular format is described in Kaitai Struct language (.ksy file) and then can be compiled with ksc into source files in one of the supported programming languages. These modules will include a generated code for a parser that can read the described data structure from a file or stream and give access to it in a nice, easy-to-comprehend API.

Using KS in your project

Typically, using formats described in KS in your project involves the following steps:

• Describe the format — i.e. create a .ksy file
• Use a visualizer to debug the format and ensure that it parses data properly
• Compile the .ksy file into a target language source file and include that file into your project
• Add the KS runtime library for your particular language into your project (don’t worry, it’s small and it’s there mostly to ensure readability of generated code)
• Use the generated class(es) to parse your binary file or stream and access its components

Check out the documentation for more information.