> Never implemented a file format, have you ;).
What widely used formats have you implemented? :)
Well, let's see...
I'm responsible for the design & implementation of the StuffIt archive file format (.sit), MacBinary III, AppleSingle & AppleDouble, PGML (the predecessor to SVG) and the Adobe PhotoDeluxe Image Archiving System (which, by the way, uses XML and ZIP).
I have also written readers and writers for XCF and PSD as part of my job as maintainer of the ImageMagick/GraphicsMagick library, PDF (3 different times), and during my work on the StuffIt product wrote the encoders and decoders for all the major archiving & encoding formats including Zip, Tar, Arc, Arj, UUcode, and BinHex. And I am sure there are others I am forgetting over my 20 years in this industry.
OK???
ar supports random access and single file extraction just fine.
I never said the format doesn't support it - I said that most libraries that work with such formats don't support that particular feature...BIG difference!!
It is MUCH easier to write a reader/writer for a format when you treat it as a sequential entity and handle all contents of it - than if you have to deal with dynamic random access requests.
Leonard -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Leonard Rosenthol <mailto:leonardr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> <http://www.lazerware.com>
