This directory contains a small example of a scanner for binary files.

The example tries to detect if an input file is a java class file by
checking if the first 4 bytes contain the magic number 0xCAFEBABE.
It uses a custom Reader class that copies bytes to characters one to
one. The characters the scanner gets to read are the bytes from the
input stream without any conversion. Many thanks to Stephen Ostermiller
for providing the custom Reader class, the original version of that
class is available from http://www.smo.f2s.com/utils/

See the JFlex manual for details on how to scan binaries and how
this is different from scanning text files.

Files:
binary.flex                 the scanner spec
StraightStreamReader.java   the custom reader class (by Stephen Ostermiller)
Makefile                    rules for make to compile and run the example
README                      this file
