This file appears to be in a binary XML format. What is this format and how can it be parsed programmatically (as opposed to using the aapt dump tool in the SDK)?
This binary format is not discussed in the documentation here.
Note: I want to access this information from outside the Android environment, preferably from Java.
This Java method, that runs on an Android, documents (what I've been able to interpret about) the binary format of the AndroidManifest.xml file in the .apk package. The second code box shows how to call decompressXML and how to load the byte[] from the app package file on the device. (There are fields whose purpose I don't understand, if you know what they mean, tell me, I'll update the info.)
// decompressXML -- Parse the 'compressed' binary form of Android XML docs
// such as for AndroidManifest.xml in .apk files
public static int endDocTag = 0x00100101;
public static int startTag = 0x00100102;
public static int endTag = 0x00100103;
public void decompressXML(byte[] xml) {
// Compressed XML file/bytes starts with 24x bytes of data,
// 9 32 bit words in little endian order (LSB first):
// 0th word is 03 00 08 00
// 3rd word SEEMS TO BE: Offset at then of StringTable
// 4th word is: Number of strings in string table
// WARNING: Sometime I indiscriminently display or refer to word in
// little endian storage format, or in integer format (ie MSB first).
int numbStrings = LEW(xml, 4*4);
// StringIndexTable starts at offset 24x, an array of 32 bit LE offsets
// of the length/string data in the StringTable.
int sitOff = 0x24; // Offset of start of StringIndexTable
// StringTable, each string is represented with a 16 bit little endian
// character count, followed by that number of 16 bit (LE) (Unicode) chars.
int stOff = sitOff + numbStrings*4; // StringTable follows StrIndexTable
// XMLTags, The XML tag tree starts after some unknown content after the
// StringTable. There is some unknown data after the StringTable, scan
// forward from this point to the flag for the start of an XML start tag.
int xmlTagOff = LEW(xml, 3*4); // Start from the offset in the 3rd word.
// Scan forward until we find the bytes: 0x02011000(x00100102 in normal int)
for (int ii=xmlTagOff; ii<xml.length-4; ii+=4) {
if (LEW(xml, ii) == startTag) {