Good practices when writing a parser for a standard file format (such as ePub)

Posted by J-F L-R on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by J-F L-R
Published on 2012-12-05T15:03:46Z Indexed on 2012/12/05 17:25 UTC
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implementations

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eBook

I am considering writing an Android reader software that can read ePubs and display them. I checked the ePub standard documents. However, these contain a lot of information. So I am wondering what is the process of implementing a standard for a file format. What are the steps to get a working implementation without passing by parts of the standard? Are there any best practices?

Also, is it even possible to program this alone in a reasonable time?

From what I have already found out, ePub is basically a zip archive. That means I could probably use zlib to decompress it. The content is in XHTML and CSS, so I believe it should be possible to display it in a WebView. The parts that are missing are writing the code that can read the metadata and manage the non-standard XHTML extensions.

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