Where can I get sample Reed-Solomon encoded data?

Question

I want to write a Reed-Solomon decoder and experiment with performance improvements. Where could I find sample data with appended Reed-Solomon parity bytes?

I am aware that Reed-Solomon is used in all kinds of 1D and 2D bar codes, but I would like to have the raw data (an array of bytes) with clear separation of payload and parity bytes.

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

Basically, a Reed-Solomon code will be composed of characters with a value between 0 and (m-1), where m is the exposant of the Galois Field used to generate the RS code. For example, in GF(2^8) (2^8 = 256), you will get a RS code composed of characters between 0 and 255 (compatible with ASCII, UTF-8 and usual binary encoding). In GF(2^16), you will get characters encoded between 0 and 65535 (compatible with UTF-16 or with UTF-8 if you encode 2 characters as one).

Other than the range of values of each character of a RS code, all the rest can be basically considered random from an external POV (it's not if you have the generator polynomial and Galois field, but for your purpose of getting a sample, you can assume a random distribution of values in the valid range).

If you want to generate real samples of a RS code with the corresponding data block, you can use the Python library pyFileFixity (disclaimer, I am the author). By default, each ecc block is separated by a md5 digest, so that you can clearly separate them. The original data is not stored, but you can easily do that by modifying the script structural_adaptive_ecc.py or header_ecc.py (the latter will be easier to modify) to also store the original data (it's just a file.write() to edit). If Python is not your thing, you can probably find a Reed-Solomon library for your language of choice, and just do a slight modification to print or save into a file the original data along the ecc blocks.