ffe is a flat file extractor. It can be used for reading different flat file structures and displaying them in different formats. ffe can read fixed length and separated text files and fixed length binary files. It is a command line tool developed under GNU/Linux. The main areas of use are extracting particular fields or records from a flat file, converting data from one format to an other, e.g. from CSV to fixed length, verifying a flat file structure, as a testing tool for flat file development, and displaying flat file content in human readable form.
| Tags | Text Processing Filters Text Editors |
|---|---|
| Licenses | GPL |
| Operating Systems | POSIX Linux |
| Implementation | C |
Recent releases


Changes: Records can now be identified using regular expressions using the new keyword "rid". The -l/--loose option does not cause the program to abort when an invalid block is found from binary input. Instead of aborting, the next valid block is searched from the input stream.


Changes: Support for fixed length binary files was added. A new "raw" output format and a -I,--info option were added.


Changes: The output format can now be selected at the field level. The last field of a fixed length structure can now have an arbitrary length. A -d, --debug option was added.


Changes: A 'field-count' configuration keyword was added and command substitution was implemented for the configuration file.


Changes: A fixed structure with a last field that is 1 byte long works now.