File Specification

The format of compiled dictionaries is relatively straightforward, as it mainly consists of ODict’s Flatbuffer schema.

However, addition header information still exists at the beginning of the file. The table below illustrates the full breakdown of a compiled .odict file, in the order in which the values are written to the file.

All values written in Little Endian byte order.

Name	Type	Bytes	Description
Signature	char[6]	6	Signature for the ODict format. Assertions fail if this signature is missing. Should always be ODICT.
Version	ushort	2	Represents the major version of ODict with which the file was created.
Content Length	long	8	Size (in bytes) of the compressed content to read. Used in assertions to validate file length.
Content	[]byte	Variable	Snappy-compressed FlatBuffer object. Must be decompressed by Snappy before it can be used.

A design decision was made to keep the structural data of the ODict format as a cross-platform Flatbuffers schema as opposed to simply encoding a Go struct so that the format could be used by anyone, even without necessarily using any of the core ODict libraries.