poka.sh

 Docs

CNT

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WinHelp Contents.

At a glance
Original creator Microsoft (WinHelp)
Purpose The contents file of a WinHelp .hlp help file: the tree shown on the Contents tab.
Extensions .cnt
Poka parser poka-cnt
Viewer poka-tree-viewer
Depth tier Parser with a shared viewer (see Depth tiers)
Breadth tier B2 Broad (see Breadth tiers)

How much Poka reads

B2 Broad. The common content of the current and the common older versions is decoded. Some named features or versions are not, and are listed.

Confidence: medium (the reviewer read the code). Basis: Reviewed 2026-10-16: parsers/poka-cnt/src/lib.rs and its unit tests (directives, level-number tree rebuild, skipped levels, = inside titles, Shift-JIS detection) and tests/samples.rs. The corpus has no .cnt file (0 files; the 15-sample floor cannot pass), so only synthetic text is tested. The format is plain text and Poka decodes the :Base, :Title, :Index and :Include directives and the leveled entries.

What Poka does not read

  • Titles in Japanese, Chinese or Korean (double-byte) files are not decoded: the file is detected and flagged, but the titles are not readable
  • :Include files are listed but not read or spliced into the tree
  • :Link and :Tab directives are not specially read (shown as generic directive text)
  • A target that carries a help-file or window suffix (topic@file.hlp, topic>window) or a macro is shown as one raw string
  • Single-byte encoding is assumed to be Windows-1250 whatever the file's actual code page
  • Capped at 5,000 entries

Background

WinHelp is Microsoft's help format from 1990, popular from Windows 3.0 to Windows XP and later dropped from Windows (Wikipedia). A .cnt is plain text whose indentation is a number: directive lines start with a colon (:Base names the help file, :Title the caption, :Index and :Include add other files), and entry lines start with their depth, optionally followed by =topic. Poka rebuilds the tree from the depth numbers and shows each entry's target topic.

Versions

Version Identifier Poka Note
WinHelp contents file :Base Read No sample remains in the corpus, so the parser is unverified on real files.

Sources