Skip to main content

A powerful declarative parser/builder for binary data

Project description

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:

  • Fields: raw bytes or numerical types

  • Structs and Sequences: combine simpler constructs into more complex ones

  • Bitwise: splitting bytes into bit-grained fields

  • Adapters: change how data is represented

  • Arrays/Ranges: duplicate constructs

  • Meta-constructs: use the context (history) to compute the size of data

  • If/Switch: branch the computational path based on the context

  • On-demand (lazy) parsing: read and parse only what you require

  • Pointers: jump from here to there in the data stream

  • Tunneling: prefix data with a byte count or compress it

Example

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 a Range in that latter is homogenous:

>>> format = Sequence(PascalString(Byte, encoding="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]]

Project details


Release history Release notifications | RSS feed

Download files

Download the file for your platform. If you're not sure which to choose, learn more about installing packages.

Source Distribution

construct-2.9.27.tar.gz (69.2 kB view details)

Uploaded Source

File details

Details for the file construct-2.9.27.tar.gz.

File metadata

  • Download URL: construct-2.9.27.tar.gz
  • Upload date:
  • Size: 69.2 kB
  • Tags: Source
  • Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? No

File hashes

Hashes for construct-2.9.27.tar.gz
Algorithm Hash digest
SHA256 3ba20b9616d7242a5f622f3a51bc47a3167275fa43705b1e43a9bacebc28ca6d
MD5 6ea0c3aada6ad0c00c50fa89e5b1b792
BLAKE2b-256 04f6526ec0614d2f48712f0a8c534f7ef90cc7acb7a27323f298e796f7897b15

See more details on using hashes here.

Supported by

AWS AWS Cloud computing and Security Sponsor Datadog Datadog Monitoring Fastly Fastly CDN Google Google Download Analytics Microsoft Microsoft PSF Sponsor Pingdom Pingdom Monitoring Sentry Sentry Error logging StatusPage StatusPage Status page