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From: Kai-Martin Knaak <knaak AT iqo DOT uni-hannover DOT de>
Subject: Re: [geda-user] C/C++ parsing library for PCB file format?
Date: Tue, 02 Apr 2013 21:51:41 +0200
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Stefan Salewski wrote:

> For now I will try parsing direct from Ruby, Ruby is really good in
> RegExp processing. And I think chances are good that PCB's file format
> will never change any more...

I sincerely hope, that this is not true. Some highly desirable features  
would require changes of the format. Think blind and burried vias, 
generalized layers, footprints with letters, net classes, net aware 
polygons, ...

 
> I have seen that kicad is using a similar text based file format like
> PCB, while Eagle seems to use bloat XML now.

XML does not necessarily mean bloat. This is much like C source code which 
can by pretty cryptic but can also be very readable. IMHO, the main 
benefit of a XML compliant format would be the availability of resilient 
parsers in quite a number of circumstances. Lately, even the gnu version 
of awk aquired XML parsing abilities (http://gawkextlib.sourceforge.net/ )

I'd say, the current file format of pcb is quite nice, concise and 
appropriate for the current job. It "just" lacks the ability to be changed 
in a backward compatible way. In some cases, the recently introduced 
attributes can be used. But in other cases this does not work. 

---<)kaimartin(>----