From: Srinivas JONNALAGADDA <srinivas.j@...>
Date: 2006-07-09T13:04:54+09:00
Subject: Re: ASN.1 for Ruby

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