POLE - portable library for structured storage
POLE is a portable C++ library to create and read structured storage. With a structured storage, you can store files inside another file, or you can even create complex directory tree, if you want to. The structured storage created by POLE is compatible with Microsoft structured storage, also sometimes called as OLE Compound Document, which are used among others in Microsoft Office. However, POLE has the advantage that it's portable (i.e you can read or write a structured storage in any supported platform), you don't need to rely on Windows library.
Source code is available at http://developer.berlios.de/projects/pole/. Please always use the latest stable version.
To compile POLE, you need a C++ compiler, with standard C++ library which supports STL (Standard Template Library). On Linux and other Unices, g++ will do the job.
POLE is just a library, you have to integrate it as part of your application/project. Since it consists of one source file and one header file, it doesn't make much sense to compile POLE as separate library (either static or dynamic). Simply add these files to your project and you're done.
The source tarball of POLE demonstrates the use of POLE to build poledump, a small utility to extract any stream inside a structured storage. If you use g++ as the compiler, you can compile poledump using the following command:
g++ -o poledump pole.cpp poledump.cpp
You may use poledump like the example below:
poledump budget.xls Workbook result.xls
The above command will extract a stream named Workbook inside Excel document (budget.xls) and save it as result.xls. File result.xls will still be recognized as a valid workbook (in raw format). Launch Microsoft Excel, open this file, and convince yourself.
POLE - Portable C++ library to access OLE Storage Copyright (C) 2002-2007 Ariya Hidayat (ariya@kde.org). All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
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