Parsing a binary file. What is a modern way?

Question

I have a binary file with some layout I know. For example let format be like this:

• 2 bytes (unsigned short) - length of a string
• 5 bytes (5 x chars) - the

Answer 1

I use ragel tool to generate pure C procedural source code (no tables) for microcontrollers with 1-2K of RAM. It did not use any file io, buffering, and produces both easy to debug code and .dot/.pdf file with state machine diagram.

ragel can also output go, Java,.. code for parsing, but I did not use these features.

The key feature of ragel is the ability to parse any byte-build data, but you can't dig into bit fields. Other problem is ragel able to parse regular structures but has no recursion and syntax grammar parsing.