Topic: QFX file from Quicken

I want to write an alternative to Quicken which implies that I want to be able to import data from Quicken.  On the Mac, the two options are QIF and QFX.  I can already parse QIF but it appears as if QFX would be good to parse.  For one, when I export to a QIF file, I get warning messages but I don't from QFX.  Also, the QIF file is 141K (text) while the QFX file is 3M and it binary.  Third, if I want to connect to banks, being able to parse OFX / QFX will be valuable.

My web search says QFX is a form of OFX and that brought me here.  I've tinkered with OFX before including the libofx library on source forge but I'm always wanting to know all the details rather than just blindly using someone else's code.

Before I go off and start researching the OFX specification, I wanted to ask a quick sanity check type question.

OFX was originally suppose to be a communication between a bank and an application I thought but now Quicken (Intuit?) has morphed it into a "file format" and it is a binary format it seems.

Will diving into the OFX specification be the place to start?  I guess my basic question (which is off topic for this forum perhaps) is how best to understand how to parse a "QFX file"?

Re: QFX file from Quicken

pedz wrote:

OFX was originally suppose to be a communication between a bank and an application I thought but now Quicken (Intuit?) has morphed it into a "file format" and it is a binary format it seems.

Indeed your assessment is correct. The protocol is called OFX, but both QFX and OFX are file formats that typicall contain FI responses. All the QFX and OFX files I have seen are plain-text and human-readable. I don't know why your QFX is binary. Perhaps it is compressed?

I am speculating now, but I suspect the difference between QFX and OFX is simply that Intuit has added a few extra directives to OFX.

pedz wrote:

Will diving into the OFX specification be the place to start?  I guess my basic question (which is off topic for this forum perhaps) is how best to understand how to parse a "QFX file"?

Since you have already have experience with libofx my suggestion is not use that, and not have to write your own parser from scratch. Furthermore, I suggest you take a look at ofxtools, which is an active and well-documented project.