read (decode) chm file content using java

Question

I want to read & show content's of chm file. What is the encoding of chm file? I don't want to use any library like jchm. I want easiest way to decode chm files & show there contents.

Answer 1

According to Wikipedia the file-format has been reverse-engineered and docs are freely available.

http://www.nongnu.org/chmspec/latest/index.html

http://metacpan.org/pod/Archive::Chm

I this link -that @Xav provided- is specially concrete on the format:

http://www.russotto.net/chm/chmformat.html

Answer 2

There's some more documentation on the CHM format here: http://www.russotto.net/chm/chmformat.html which might help you to write your own decoding code if you're not willing to use a library to do it.

Alternatively, there are plenty of freely downloadable decoders that will convert CHM back to HTML - have you considered decoding offline and simply including the decoded files in your application?