For the list of asn1c command line options, see asn1c -h
or man asn1c
.
The comprehensive documentation on this compiler is in doc/asn1c-usage.pdf.
Please also read the FAQ file.
An excellent book on ASN.1 is written by Olivier Dubuisson: "ASN.1 Communication between heterogeneous systems", ISBN:0-12-6333361-0.
(also check out doc/asn1c-quick.pdf)
After installing the compiler (see INSTALL.md), you may use the asn1c command to compile the ASN.1 specification:
asn1c <module.asn1> # Compile module
If several specifications contain interdependencies, all of them must be specified at the same time:
asn1c <module1.asn1> <module2.asn1> ... # Compile interdependent modules
The asn1c source tarball contains the examples/ directory with several ASN.1 modules and a script to extract the ASN.1 modules from RFC documents. Refer to the examples/README file in that directory.
To compile the X.509 PKI module:
./asn1c/asn1c -P ./examples/rfc3280-*.asn1 # Compile-n-print
In this example, the -P option is to print the compiled text on the standard output. The default behavior is that asn1c compiler creates multiple .c and .h files for every ASN.1 type found inside the specified ASN.1 modules.
The compiler's -E and -EF options are used for testing the parser and the semantic fixer, respectively. These options will instruct the compiler to dump out the parsed (and fixed) ASN.1 specification as it was "understood" by the compiler. It might be useful for checking whether a particular syntactic construction is properly supported by the compiler.
asn1c -EF <module-to-test.asn1> # Check semantic validity
The asn1c compiler works by processing the ASN.1 module specifications in several stages:
There are several command-line options reserved for printing the results after each stage of operation:
<parser> => print (-E) <parser> => <fixer> => print (-E -F) <parser> => <fixer> => <compiler> => print (-P) <parser> => <fixer> => <compiler> => save-compiled [default]
-- Lev Walkin vlm@lionet.info