File processing in Erlang [closed] - erlang

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Is Erlang good option for file processing of different types? For example- reading pdf,Word document,Excel sheet and transforming them? I know we can use Apache POI/Tika which are Java based and then integrate using JErlang.
I am not very familiar with Erlang's bit syntax but wanted to check if Erlang is suited for such kind of application without using Apache POI?

Answer 1

Erlang has a great binary support which makes it a great language for parsing different kind of binaries.
i.e. to decode a tcp segment by using binary syntax in erlang you can do something like
decode(Segment) ->
case Segment of
<< SourcePort:16, DestinationPort:16,
SequenceNumber:32,
AckNumber:32,
DataOffset:4, _Reserved:4, Flags:8, WindowSize:16,
Checksum:16, UrgentPointer:16,
Payload/binary>> when DataOffset>4
->
OptSize = (DataOffset - 5)*32,
<< Options:OptSize, Message/binary >> = Payload,
<> = <>,
%% Can now process the Message according to the
%% Options (if any) and the flags CWR, ..., FIN.
binary_to_list(Message)
end.
which compared to other languages is a super easy way to use pattern matching and binary support to decode/encode binaries.
Nevertheless, Erlang is more about concurrent processing and message passing between those processes, so I wouldn't use it to transform/parse binaries, I would instead use Erlang to manage the web server/api and to handle all the concurrent connections, and I would delegate the job of transforming the documents to raw c/c++ for performance, plus on c/c++ or either on java you have richer libraries to work with pdf/excel/word documents