kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Tiger12506 <tiger12506@xxxxxxxxx>]

This email is merely a suggestion.

I would personally approach it by having each plugin determine the 
file's eligibility to be parsed. After all, who can know better than the 
parser author whether or not a file will be successfully parsed by a 
plugin? I would NOT suggest having any assumptions made by the calling 
code -- one email I think hinted that you could read a section of file 
and then pass in a string to the plugin function -- but NO, because who 
knows how far to read in to the file but the author of the plugin? Who 
knows what encoding that file is in? The person in the best position to 
answer that question is the plugin author.

If a plugin writer does not provide an implementation for that function, 
then the base class can do whatever you want it to do -- make an 
educated guess, rely entirely on file types, prompt the user, anything 
you want.

I doubt that testing file types is going to be your most computationally 
intensive task when loading imported files.

Perhaps the one true answer (lol) is a mixture of the two. Why not order 
the plugins to test against based on the file extension? Though file 
extensions are not the best indicators of a file type, it should narrow 
it down to a couple plugins. Each could open,read a dozen bytes,close in 
a milliseconds.