4 replies to this topic

[CamDawg]

There have been times when I'm trying to read more than a few bytes and I would love to have a READ/WRITE function than can take more than the standard 1, 2, or 4 bytes (BYTE, SHORT and LONG respectively). What I would like are functions that can read/write an arbitrary number of bytes. They would be the same as READ/WRITE_BYTE, except with an extra argument to designate the number of bytes read/written. I propose:

READ_ARBITRARY numberofbytes offset "variable"
WRITE_ARBITRARY numberofbytes offset value

I.e if I wanted to read 16 bytes at 0x06 into the variable "info", then

READ_ARBITRARY 16 0x06 "info"

Or if I wanted to write 5 bytes at 0xA2

WRITE_ARBITRARY 5 0xA2 0x6400A4CC90

These functions can already be accomplished by using a series of READ/WRITEs at consecutive offsets, but these functions would make coding much easier.

[japheth]

Wes would have to write up a BAM decompression function as well though, since a lot of the BAMs are compressed using the BAMC format.

[weimer]

Because of issues that are elided in your post (like byte-ordering and parsing huge decimal values), if I were to do this it would be like this:

Add a command to read the contents of a file into a variable.

Add a command to write the contents of a variable into the file you are currently patching at the specified offset with no trailing 0. (Like WRITE_EVALUATED_ASCII, but with no 8-byte limit).

Would you still want such things?

[Avenger_teambg]

Could you be persuaded about adding complete BAM frames?