[lnkForumImage]
TotalShareware - Download Free Software
Confronta i prezzi di migliaia di prodotti.
Asp Forum
 Home | Login | Register | Search 


 

Forums >

comp.lang.ruby

Re: ASN.1 for Ruby

Srinivas Jonnalagadda

7/8/2006 6:27:00 AM

Francis Cianfrocca wrote:
> ASN.1 is one of those binary formats that grew out of ISO. It's lack
> of popularity can perhaps be attributed to the lack of popularity for
> other ISO things like X.400 (ISO MOTIS) mail.

JS: Several of the biological and chemical databases compiled by NCBI
use ASN.1 format. For backward compatibility, they also provide flat
files. However, for newer software, ASN.1 format is recommended.

> Is anyone actually interested in ASN.1 support for Ruby? I implemented
> enough of it for LDAP in the Net::LDAP library, in a reasonably
> encapsulated
> way so it could be abstracted into its own package. I'd be happy to do this
> if anyone has a use for it.

JS: It would be great to have a Ruby library to parse and search such
biological and chemical databases in ASN.1 format. For now, since I
do not have the time to develop one, I am using their flat file
format.

You could take a look at
http://www.ncbi.nih.gov/Sitemap/sampler... to see a sample of the
data in flat format.

Please send an e-mail to me offline, should you feel that you could
extract and complete your library.

Best regards,

JS
3 Answers

Tim Bray

7/8/2006 3:14:00 PM

0

On Jul 7, 2006, at 11:26 PM, Srinivas JONNALAGADDA wrote:

> JS: Several of the biological and chemical databases compiled by NCBI
> use ASN.1 format. For backward compatibility, they also provide
> flat
> files. However, for newer software, ASN.1 format is recommended.

People who offer data like this usually regret it when they discover
how few ASN.1 tools there are. I've *never* found a decently-
performing free general-purpose ASN.1 reader; there are a few that
you can find, but they're typically buggy, slow, and usually fail on
the dataset that you're interested in. -Tim

Srinivas Jonnalagadda

7/9/2006 4:05:00 AM

0

Tim Bray wrote:
> On Jul 7, 2006, at 11:26 PM, Srinivas JONNALAGADDA wrote:
>
>> JS: Several of the biological and chemical databases compiled by NCBI
>> use ASN.1 format. For backward compatibility, they also provide flat
>> files. However, for newer software, ASN.1 format is recommended.
>
> People who offer data like this usually regret it when they discover how
> few ASN.1 tools there are. I've *never* found a decently-performing free
> general-purpose ASN.1 reader; there are a few that you can find, but
> they're typically buggy, slow, and usually fail on the dataset that
> you're interested in. -Tim

That is probably why NCBI, in this case, also provides a set of tools to
deal with their data.

However, if I could quickly write a few lines of Ruby to parse some data
in my own way, I would rather avoid doing that in C. And that is how I
was asking Francis about a Ruby ASN.1 library.

Best regards,

JS

Daniel Martin

7/11/2006 2:23:00 PM

0

"Francis Cianfrocca" <garbagecat10@gmail.com> writes:

> The thing about ASN.1 is that it's not a grammar. It's actually a
> grammar-grammar, so it always makes use of an context-specific data
> definition for each domain. Has NCBI published one for theirs?

There are a whole load of *.asn files (in ASN.1 format) inside
ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/toolbox/ncbi_tools/CURRENT/n...