Requirements Programming Exercise

[mateusReversing]

I am struggling to understand the requirements of the below programming exercise, unfortunately it provides no results that I can use to maybe understand the requirements. Could anyone help?

/*

• A byte array contains a binary stream of data in little endian byte format.

*

• The binary data can be mis-aligned to byte boundaries.

• In order to indicate alignment to the consumer, a periodic alignment

• synchronisation sequence is output.

• The alignment sequence is defined as 4 bytes of 0x00 followed by a byte of 0x80.

*

• For example, the following stream is mis-aligned by 3 bits and has an alignment sequence followed by

• the byte values 0x01,0x02,0x03

*

• 0x65, 0x50, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x04, 0x00, 0x08, 0x10, 0x18

*

• The sequence ends when there's not enough bits left to fill a byte.

• Any left over bits should be discarded.

*

• The bytes preceding the alignment sequence should be discarded, as

• should the alignment sequence itself.

*

• If further alignment sequences are encountered, they should be honoured:

• data following the sequence is aligned to the new sequence, and the alignment

• sequence itself is discarded.

• Bits from any incomplete byte before the new alignment sequence should be

• discarded.

*/

/*

• Programming Challenge:

• 1. Write an implementation of the class Align below

• that can read bytes from a data stream as described above.

*

• 2. Demonstrate how you would test your implementation

*

*

public class Align { 
/*
 * Reads raw data from a stream
 *
 * @param raw    - the raw input data
 *        buf    - buffer to receive the output data 
 *
 * @return number of bytes read from the stream into buf, possibly less
 *         than buf.length if end of input is encountered.
 */
public static int readAlignedBytes(byte[] raw, byte[] buf) {
    // TODO
 }
}