Yarhl 4.1.0

Yarhl, A format ResearcH Library

Yarhl is a set of libraries that helps to implement and convert file formats It empowers you with...

• ♻️ ... APIs to easily convert between custom formats.
• 📚 ... guidelines to implement and test custom format converters.
• 🔢 ... advance binary and text reading / writing, encoding and serialization.
• 📃 ... standard formats implementation like PO for translations.
• 📂 ... virtual file system to unpack and pack containers efficiently.
• 🔌... plugin API to find formats and converters in .NET assemblies.

Usage

The project has the following .NET libraries (NuGet packages via nuget.org). The libraries support .NET (Core) LTS versions.

• 
  • Yarhl.FileFormat: format conversion APIs.
  • Yarhl.FileSystem: virtual file system.
  • Yarhl.IO: streams, binary and text reading / writing.
• 
  • Yarhl.Media.Text: translation formats and converters (Po), table replacer.
  • Yarhl.Media.Text.Encoding: euc-jp and token-escaped encodings.
• 
  • Yarhl.Plugins: load nearby .NET assemblies and find type implementations.
  • Yarhl.Plugins.FileFormat: find formats and converters from loaded assemblies.

Quick demo

Yarhl allows you to work with different file formats with a unified API for conversion into binary (serialization / deserialization). Let's try to create a new translatable file format PO from Yarhl.Media.Text and save it into disk.

[!code-csharpDemo PO]

It's frequent to find formats that are containers. Yarhl allows having a virtual file system to work with its content without having to extract it into disk (saving space and time). For instance, let's open a game file from Nintendo DS that contains thousand of files. Then we will navigate through its files, unpacking, decompressing and finally converting one file into PO. We can use the following libraries for this task:

• Ekona: support of NDS game file system.
• LayTea: support of formats from Professor Layton games.

[!code-csharpDemo containers]

Showcase

Some cool projects built with Yarhl:

• Texim: experimental API for image file formats.
• Ekona: support Nintendo DS file formats.
• Lemon: support Nintendo 3DS file formats.
• LayTea: modding tools for Professor Layton games.
• Attack of Friday Monsters tools: modding tools for Attack of the Friday Monsters game.
• Metatron: translation framework for Shin Megami Tensei saga games.

License

The software is licensed under the terms of the MIT license.