ayrdim
What is the Elixir way of decoding/parsing binary data?
What is the Elixir way of decoding/parsing binary data?
I’m currently using the pattern matching (E.g. for a float <flt::float> = <<63, 243, 190, 118, 200, 180, 57, 88>>) to decode/parse bytes, is this the only way to decode/parse binary data? Ideally I would prefer to call a function that takes in bytes and returns the decoded value.
My intuition tells me that Float.parse() and Integer.parse() should perform the same conversion as the example above but they seem to only parse strings.
Trending in Questions
Other Trending Topics
Latest on Elixir Forum
Sponsor Spotlight
Supporting innovation across the BEAM ecosystem.
Categories:
Sub Categories:
Forums
Popular Tags
- #ecto
- #liveview
- #troubleshooting
- #learning-elixir
- #deployment
- #library
- #erlang
- #testing
- #genserver
- #mix
- #absinthe
- #remote-other
- #otp
- #plug
- #how-to-question
- #macros
- #postgres
- #channels
- #elixirconf
- #exunit
- #discussion
- #code-sync
- #javascript
- #podcasts
- #onsite
- #dialyzer
- #docker
- #authentication
- #umbrella
- #full-time-contract
- #podcasts-by-brainlid
- #ecto-query
- #elixir-ls
- #phoenix_html
- #iex
- #blog-post
- #graphql
- #genstage
- #ai
- #elixirconf-us
- #websockets
- #supervisor
- #advent-of-code
- #distillery
- #processes
- #api
- #forms
- #metaprogramming
- #performance
- #security
Our Sponsors
Build Elixir applications with speed and confidence.
Supporting innovation across the BEAM ecosystem.
We build reliable cloud platforms for business-critical systems.
Catch errors, track performance, monitor hosts and more.
Error tracking, logs, uptime, and Just Enough APM. Built for developers.
Practical resources that improve the lives of professional developers.
Bringing learning, work and compliance together since 1987.
The deployment platform built for Elixir: PaaS ease, VPS control.
The team behind Membrane, Popcorn, LiveDebugger. Available for hire.
Courses that'll move you from confusion to "Aha, now I get it!"
Marked As Solved
adamu
You can easily wrap it in a function:
Here’s a version that just parses a float from the front and returns the rest of the binary:
Also Liked
axelson
This is one of my favorite articles about binary pattern matching in Elixir, it’s really neat how they apply binary pattern matching to the task of parsing a PNG:
Ridtt
Hello friends! I’m about to drop to community, under MIT licence, my library for bidirectional parse/encode communication.
Idea is you declaring shape of your binary data and set of constraints, highly dynamic ones, like dynamic length, item size, items count, dynamic variant dispatching, optionality of fields using callbacks. Callbacks may receive on request fields from current parse routine along with context options from total parse tree.
Most of the time you will work only with type conversion called ‘managed’. Most human value is possible, like number, utf8 string and so on. Does not matter actual data is utf16 and actual numbers are hidden under mask, I have abstractions to keep it complexity managed away from developer.
There is such features as receiving requested type conversion (binary version, for example) and option scoped from particular context interface.
In additional there is feature of virtual field. Virtual fields allow you declare your data as most readable and sane way independent of actual shape of binary.
Everything compiled down to elixir binary pattern matching, using graph topology I’m able to optimise most of blocks with known shape to single pattern and provide requested intermediate values only once, close as possible to usage and passing around only as function arguments, not creating any allocations or intermediate objects.
The most benefits you will get if you working with complex legacy protocol and you need flow like receive → modify → send.
It’s running in our production for few apps for half of year, and currently I’m finishing basic documentation.
Let me know if you guys are interested, I will try to finish basic docs and publish it this week!
trarbr
One of the great things about binary pattern matching is that it allows you to decode multiple values (which can be of different type) from a binary in one go. I just gave a talk at FOSDEM that is an introduction to bit syntax (which powers the binary pattern matching). The talk goes through all the basics and has a couple of examples after the 15-minute mark that show how bit syntax can be used to decode multiple different values at once. The talk is available here - maybe it is useful.
And if you need to wrap it in a function, e.g. for use with pipes, @adamu’s approach is definitely valid.
Last Post!
Ridtt
Topic: BinStruct - library for writing declarative code to get rich generated set of binary parsing/encoding features