[tester4058]

Hello,

i wonder if there is a specification of the syntactical structure of .lin files anywhere. Can anyone help?

Thank you,

tester4058

[diana_eva]

Depends what you plan to do. You can contact fred@bridgebase.com and ask him. Part of the .lin structure is confidential and copyright protected.

[jsm3520]

tester4058, on 2011-June-30, 05:18, said:

Hello,

i wonder if there is a specification of the syntactical structure of .lin files anywhere. Can anyone help?

Thank you,

tester4058

No authorised specification is freely available. Various users have discovered properties of some commands. In my opinion, writing of lin-files by hand requires a rather special personality -- just like assembly code for computer programming, only worse.

Taken literally, the syntax structure is simple: a .lin-file consists of a sequence of commands, each of which consists of a two-letter identifier and an argument surrounded by |-characters. An argument is written in text-mode where some characters have special meanings. The secrets of lin-files lies in the meanings of commands and the conventions used in text-mode. Obviously a |-character cannot be used in text-mode, and I have not been able to find out if it can be produced by other means.

My experience comes from work on a higher-level language that can be translated into lin-files. It uses a subset of lin-tags that have been reasonably described on the net. The result is usable, but not polished and depend heavily on other software.

[denwer]

The full specification is probably still absent, but this bbo official document helps to understand the idea: HandViewer.

By the way it explains an interesting functionality of showing arbitrary bridge movies or puzzles through bridgebase server. A lot of examples of use on this page: http://bridge.df7cb.de

[morgoth85]

Hi.
I would like to create open source parser for lin format.
Anyone has some kind of specification or documentation about that?

[PhilKing]

morgoth85, on 2013-July-17, 10:58, said:

Hi.
I would like to create open source parser for lin format.
Anyone has some kind of specification or documentation about that?

Have you tried asking Richard Pavlicek?

[barmar]

morgoth85, on 2013-July-17, 10:58, said:

Anyone has some kind of specification or documentation about that?

Read the earlier messages in the thread. AFAIK, little has changed.

[morgoth85]

I created simple Ruby parser, by guessing what this format realy do: https://github.com/morgoth/lin
It's available on MIT license.