Starting with version 0.9.0, Aewan features an all-new, easier to parse
file format. Prior versions used a binary (largely undocumented) file
format, and relied on a program (ae2aes) to convert it to a readable
format. With the new format, the ae2aes utility became unnecessary
and was deprecated.
An aewan document is a gzipped file. Therefore, you must first unzip
it in order to be able to parse its contents. On the command line, you
could use zcat or something of the sort. On a program, you will
probably want to use the zlib library.
In the future it might be better for Aewan to supply a shared library
to enable parsing of aewan files with minimal effort. Such a library would
have to be integrated with the editor in order not to have to duplicate
code (i.e. the editor itself would be just a client of the library).
But for the time being, you have to read and parse the format
on your own.
FILE FORMAT
In the description below, the items in between brackets are NOT literal,
they are placeholders. [S] is a placeholder for a string and [N] is a
placeholder for a decimal integer, and [B] is a placeholder for a boolean
value ('true' or 'false'). A line with "..." is not literal either, it
just means that the lines above repeat a certain number of times.
Indentation is ignored, but all other whitespace is significant.
In particular, you can't omit the space that immediately follows
the ':' field delimiters, or supply more than one space there.
Notice that the file format does not use any quotation marks
for the values, not even strings.
REPRESENTATION OF STRINGS
Strings are represented almost literally in the file (where the [S]
placeholders are in the blueprint above), and are not put in between
quotes or anything. However, special characters (ASCII codes 1 to 31)
are escaped: the escape code is a backslash, followed by the character
'0' + ch, where ch is the special character. Thus, a newline character
would be represented by "\:", since ":" is '0' + 10.
REPRESENTATION OF INTEGERS AND BOOLEANS
Integers use just the plain old decimal representation. The booleans
are represented as strings: either "true" or "false" (without quotes).
REPRESENTATION OF LAYER LINES
Each layer-line is a string, but it is specially formatted in order
to convey the characters and attibutes in that line. In order to
understand the format of a layer-line string, it is first necessary
to introduce the concept of cells. A cell in an aewan layer is each
of the spaces that can contain a character. A cell has two pieces
of data: the character that is in it, and a color attribute.
The character is just that: an 8-bit value represing the character
drawn there. The color attribute is an 8-bit unsigned value that packs the
foreground and background color of a given cell, as well as standout
and blink attributes.
The following color codes are used: 0=black, 1=red, 2=green,
3=yellow, 4=blue, 5=magenta, 6=cyan, 7=white.
The 8 bits of the attribute have the following meanings: SFFFLBBB.
Where S is the standout bit, FFF is the 3-bit color code for
the foreground color, L is the blink bit, and BBB is the
3-bit color code for the background color.
The layer-line string is composed of the hexadecimal representation
of layer_width*2 bytes. Each 2 bytes is the information for one
cell of the line: the first byte is the character, and the second
is the attribute. For example, the hex representation for 'A' is
0x41, so a line with five 'A's each of them in a different foreground
color (but all with black background) would be represented as
41104120413041404150.
LICENSE INFORMATION
Copyright (c) 2004 Bruno Takahashi C. de Oliveira. All rights reserved.
This program is licensed under the GNU General Public License,
version 2 or, at your option, any later version. For full license
information, please refer to the COPYING file that accompanies
the program.
