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In my environment there exists an application that creates a raw ascii data file on a given host in real time. I wanted to take this raw data and put it up in a GUI analysis window, so I wrote a POE-based Perl-Tk script, which uses POE::Wheel::FollowTail (Thanks Rocco, et. al.) as the data feed and uses Perl-Tk as the GUI. This works very well.

Now, the application has a "-binary" option, which will create a raw binary file on a given host in real time. I want my GUI analysis program to be able to work with this data as well. What should I do?

Being lazy, I was hoping I could just define a different filter for POE::Wheel::FollowTail, that instead of being line oriented, would be record oriented (each record begins with 0xfefefefe).

I currently have a binary parser that can parse the data. Assuming the binary data is slurped up into the scalar "$data", the following code works great:
Update: The regular expression shown here is very wrong (works in some basic cases, blows chunks on most fringe cases) - Please ignore it and see my next comment on this node for a much better example. 

while($data) {
    # Find next beginning-of-record flag & extract record...
    $data =~ s/^[^\xfe]*(\xfe\xfe\xfe\xfe[^\xfe]+)// || die "No luck";
    my $event=$1;

    # Send record to parser...
    $parser->parse( $event );

    # Print restult...
    print "events DUMP:\n", Dumper($parser->{events}), "\n"; }
}

[download]
Being very new to POE and filters, is there something already existing that I could use? I've toyed with modifying one of the following:

POE::Filter::RecordBlock
POE::Filter::Regexp
POE::Filter::Block

Do any of these make sense for what I want to do? Should I punt on using FollowTail and try something else?

Any advice is appreciated!

-Craig

In reply to POE::Wheel::FollowTail to read binary records!?! by cmv

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