language agnostic - General approach to reading lnk files

Question

Several frameworks and languages seem to have lnk file parsers (C#, Java, Python, certainly countless others), to get to their targets, properties, etc. I'd like to know what is the general approach to reading lnk files, if I want to parse the lnk in another language that does not have said feature. Is there a Windows API for this?

Answer 1

There is not an official document from Microsoft describing lnk file format but there are some documents which have description of the format. Here is one of them: Shortcut File Format (.lnk)

As for the API you can use IShellLink Interface