First at all for those, who does not know what is sscanf, I will explain a bit. It is standard C function, which reads string buffer, parses it according to format string and put values into variable  references passed to sscanf. So, it is opposite for Delphi Format function.

So, original C/C++ source was using sscanf in a lot of places. I was thinking about 3 options, at least:

• rewrite using regular expression library - TRegExpr;
• rewrite using Delphi RTL functions like a Pos, Copy, etc and custom parsing code;
• port C/C++ sscanf to Delphi.

First option required to translate format string from sscanf format to regular expression one. Playing a bit with both things, I got it will be error prone way. Second option - the same, because some format strings were really complex. So ... I have ported sscanf source code to Delphi.

Some links how to use sscanf:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanf
• http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/clibrary/cstdio/sscanf.html
• http://docs.roxen.com/pike/7.0/tutorial/strings/sscanf.xml

And Delphi source code and demo application you can find here.