pabo 0.1.3

Description:

pabo 0.1.3

What is this?
Parsing binary data from Python has always been a bit of a pain, thanks to the
weirdly designed struct module in Python's standard library.
struct uses format strings to specify the layout of binary data, where each
character specifies the type of data being packed/unpacked. But no can remember
the format characters to begin with! This has led to numerous packages cropping
in an attempt to solve the problem, such as:

bread
construct
structures

and many others. pabo is my response to such packages. It makes
parsing binary data so easy, anyone could do it! For example, here is how you
would parse the beginning of a PNG file to get the width and height of the
image:
import pabo as pb

png = pb.Spec(
{
"magic": pb.Const(
b"\x89PNG\x0d\x0a\x1a\x0a",
pb.Bytes(8),
),
"ihdr_size": pb.Int(4, endian="big"),
"ihdr_id": pb.Const(b"IHDR", pb.Bytes(4)),
"width": pb.Int(4, endian="big"),
"height": pb.Int(4, endian="big"),
}
)

data = png.parse("example.png")

which would return a dictionary with the parsed data, like so:
{
'magic': b'\x89PNG\r\n\x1a\n',
'ihdr_size': 13,
'ihdr_id': b'IHDR',
'width': 602,
'height': 172,
}

For more real examples, check out the priwo package, which uses
pabo to parse pulsar data from binary files (in fact, many of pabo's
features are directly motivated by their need in priwo!). Documentation is in
development, so stay tuned!
Installation
Installing pabo is as easy as:
pip install pabo

Philosophy
The philosophy behind pabo is: be simple, yet be fast and full of features.
This implies that I deliberately avoid coding in features that are too magical
or obscure, in contrast to other packages, such as construct. This allows
users of pabo to also become contributors, since the internals of pabo are
clean and easy-to-understand.