Hello all, I'm a bioinformatics student currently creating small in-house protein-ligand database. I'm very new to ASN, (started a few days ago) and facing practical problems with it right now.
I have to extract information from ASCII-encoded ASN.1 datafile which I have received from a certain obsolete biological database. Unfortunately, I couldn't get any ASN.1 specification of this database, though I had tried every possible means. So I'm considering reverse-engineer ASN.1 definition from the ASCII-decoded ASN.1 data. 1) I assume I can accomplish this by trial and error: First presume certain ASN.1 definition, judging from instances of the database, then make a parser. If the parsing fails, modify previous definition, create a new parser, and so on. Are there better ways to automate these tasks? The number of instances in this database is about 50,000. 2) There seems to be many ASN.1 compilers which can encode/decode data as a binary stream like BER, but I couldn't find ASCII decoder(parser). Is it just a matter of using tools like yacc when it comes to decoding *ASCII* data of ASN.1, or are there any such tools publicly available on the web? (so that I would rather not re-invent the wheel.) Sorry if these questions aren't appropriate for this list. Regards, Keishi
