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About PADS (excerpted from http://www.padsproj.org)

1 What is PADS?

PADS is a declarative data description language that allows data analysts to describe both the physical layout of ad hoc data sources and semantic properties of that data. From such descriptions, the PADS compiler generates libraries and tools for manipulating the data, including parsing routines, statistical profiling tools, translation programs to produce well-behaved formats such as XML or those required for loading relational databases, and tools for running XQueries over raw PADS data sources. The descriptions (*.p files) are concise enough to serve as ``living'' documentation while flexible enough to describe most of the ASCII, binary, and Cobol formats that we have seen in practice. The generated parsing library provides for robust, application-specific error handling.

2 Who should use PADS?

PADS is suitable for describing ad hoc data formats in binary, ASCII, and EBCDIC encodings. From a PADS description, the PADS compiler generates a C library for manipulating the associated data source. Data analysts can use the generated library directly, or they can use a suite of auxiliary tools to summarize the data, validate it, translate it into XML, or reformat it into a form suitable for loading into relational databases.

3 Who shouldn't use PADS?

PADS is not designed to parse XML data or data already in a relational database. Such data should be processed with XML or database-specific tools.

4 PADS and snmp-parser

snmp-parser consists of PADS description of SNMP traces (snmp.p) and source code of accumulator and formatter application (snmp-accum.c and snmp-fmt.c). To build the applications, the users are required to install PADS system first and compile the snmp-parser source files (*.p and *.c) using PADS compiler. PADS compiler generates a C library for manipulating snmp traces, which is used for building snmp-parser applications (snmp-accum and snmp-fmt).