Introduction

In this section, we’ll discuss why I wrote bread, and give a rough sense of what it can do.

Motivation

Here’s an example from the documentation for Python’s struct library::

record = 'raymond   \x32\x12\x08\x01\x08'
name, serialnum, school, gradelevel = unpack('<10sHHb', record)

The format specification is dense, but it’s also really hard to understand. What was H again? is b signed? Am I sure I’m unpacking those fields in the right order?

Now what happens if I have arrays of complex structures? Deeply nested structures? This can get messy really fast.

Here’s bread’s format specification for the above example::

import bread as b
record_spec = [
    {"endianness" : b.LITTLE_ENDIAN},
    ("name", b.string(10)),
    ("serialnum", b.uint16),
    ("school", b.uint16),
    ("gradelevel", b.byte)
]

Here’s how to parse using that specification::

>>> parsed_record = b.parse(record, record_spec)
>>> parsed_record.name
"raymond   "
>>> parsed_record.school
264

Here’s a more complicated format specification::

nested_array_struct = [
    {"endianness" : b.BIG_ENDIAN},
    ("first", b.uint8),
    ("matrix", b.array(3, b.array(3, b.uint8))),
    ("last", b.uint8)
]

And how to parse using it::

>>> data = bytearray([42, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 0xdb])
>>> nested_parsed = b.parse(data, nested_array_struct)
>>> print nested_parsed
first: 42
matrix: [[0, 1, 2], [3, 4, 5], [6, 7, 8]]
last: 219

Goals (and Non-Goals)

bread was designed to read binary files into a read-only object format that could be used by other tools. It’s not really meant for writing binary data at this point (although I can imagine future versions being able to do something like that if I find the need).

I wrote bread with ease of use, rather than speed of execution, as a first-order concern. That’s not to say that bread is really slow, but if you’re writing something that analyzes gigabytes of binary data and speed is your main concern, you may want to just roll your own optimized format reader in something like C and call it a day.