ASN.1 Comma Separated Value Support in the Time-Optimized Runtime

OSS ASN.1/C and C++ tools now support an ASN.1 CSV feature in the TOED. The representation structures/objects can be encoded into comma separated value format.

Comma separated values or CSV is a simple way of storing information as text fields separated by commas.  Data stored this way can be loaded into spreadsheets or read by a simple parser for doing data analysis.  For example, in mobile telephone billing, call data records (CDRs) are converted to CSV for subsequent simple analysis, whether for viewing in a spreadsheet program, or producing various kinds of charts related to cost or location information.

Another example is in machine learning where often data in CSV format is used for training ML models.  You can decode incoming binary data, and encode it into CSV format to make it available to the ML model.

In the OSS ASN.1/C and OSS ASN.1/C++ tools, there is a new command line option –csv which instructs the compiler to generate code for producing CSV records for ASN.1 messages.  This enables you to call specific functions in the OSS runtime libraries to customize various options for how the records should be generated, then allows you to call the encoder (ossEncode() in C, the encode() method in C++) to generate a CSV record from the local structures or objects.  Some of the features that can be customized include whether a header record is present or not, what character should be used as the column separator, and whether booleans or enumerators should be display as numbers vs. text.

This feature is currently available in the time-optimized runtime of the OSS ASN.1 C, and C++ tools.  Work is in progress for adding this to the OSS ASN.1 Java and C# tools. You can find details of the feature in the online documentation. A free evaluation is available here. If you have questions about CSV support in the OSS ASN.1 tools, please contact technical support at support@oss.com.

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