A powerful declarative symmetric parser/builder for binary data
Construct is a powerful declarative and symmetrical parser and builder for binary data.
Instead of writing imperative code to parse a piece of data, you declaratively define a data structure that describes your data. As this data structure is not code, you can use it in one direction to parse data into Pythonic objects, and in the other direction, to build objects into binary data.
The library provides both simple, atomic constructs (such as integers of various sizes), as well as composite ones which allow you form hierarchical and sequential structures of increasing complexity. Construct features bit and byte granularity, easy debugging and testing, an easy-to-extend subclass system, and lots of primitive constructs to make your work easier:
A Struct
is a collection of ordered, named fields::
>>> format = Struct(
... "signature" / Const(b"BMP"),
... "width" / Int8ub,
... "height" / Int8ub,
... "pixels" / Array(this.width * this.height, Byte),
... )
>>> format.build(dict(width=3,height=2,pixels=[7,8,9,11,12,13]))
b'BMP\x03\x02\x07\x08\t\x0b\x0c\r'
>>> format.parse(b'BMP\x03\x02\x07\x08\t\x0b\x0c\r')
Container(signature=b'BMP')(width=3)(height=2)(pixels=[7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13])
A Sequence
is a collection of ordered fields, and differs from Array
and GreedyRange
in that those two are homogenous::
>>> format = Sequence(PascalString(Byte, "utf8"), GreedyRange(Byte))
>>> format.build([u"lalaland", [255,1,2]])
b'\nlalaland\xff\x01\x02'
>>> format.parse(b"\x004361789432197")
['', [52, 51, 54, 49, 55, 56, 57, 52, 51, 50, 49, 57, 55]]