[atorodius]

Reading obj c brought back some good memories of when I coded iPhone apps around 2009. Great language

On topic: parsing others file formats has to be one of the most fun and most terrible things. The bliss when it ends up working is great

[bayindirh]

I have unintentionally spent a lot of time parsing things in my work and side projects.

When you have a spec, parsing things, even if it's a bit terse (or awful), is not a problem. You look to the code you have to handle that terse bits with pity, but if it works, it works.

On the other hand, when you need to parse something undocumented, and it's bad (PSD, Office formats, bytestream from a dodgy IR multitouch pointer for a smartboard), you suffer to a level where every emo teen yearns and anybody who goes through real pain either feels better for themselves or hug you in empathy.

It's that bad.

[hereonout2]

I second this, it's a great fun exercise parsing various binary file formats. At various times through my career I started with simple stuff like BMP and worked up to packetized media streams.

On the way learned a lot about bit manipulation and reading ISO type specifications.