construct-typing

This project is an extension of the python package construct. This Repository consitst of two packages:

• construct-stubs: Adding .pyi for the whole construct package (according to PEP 561 stub-only packages)
• construct_typed: Adding the additional classes that help with autocompletion and additional type hints.

Installation

This package comply to PEP 561. So most of the static code analysers will recognise the stubs automatically.

You just have to type:

pip install construct-typing

Usage

I'm mostly working with VSCode and Pylance (which works really great) ??? But i have also tested the stubs with mypy. ????

Explanation

Stubs

The construct-stubs package is used for creating type hints for the orignial construct package. In particular the build and parse methods get type hints. So the core of the stubs are the TypeVar's ParsedType and BuildTypes:

• The build method of a Construct converts an object of one of the types defined by BuildTypes to a bytes object.
• The parse method of a Construct converts a bytes object to an object of type ParsedType.

For each of the Constructs it is defined which type it is parsed to and from which it can be build. For example:

• an Int16ub construct parses to an int and can be build from an int.
• an Bytes construct parsed to a bytes and can be build from an bytes, bytearray or memoryview.
• an Array(5, Int16ub) construct parses to a ListContainer[int] and can be build from an List[int].

The problem is to describe the more complex constructs like:

• Sequence which has heterogenous subcons in comparison to an Array with only homogenous subcons.
• Struct, BitStruct, Union which has heterogenous and named subcons.

Currently only the very unspecific type typing.Any can be used as type hint (maybe in the future it can be optimised a little, when variadic generics become available). But the biggest disadvantage is that autocompletion for the named subcons is not available.

Typed

To include autocompletion and further enhance the type hints for these complex constructs the construct_typed package is used as an extension to the original construct package.

It implements the following new types:

• TypedEnum
• TypedStruct
• TypedBitStruct
• TypedUnion

An example of the added TypedStruct class:

from construct import Const, Int8ub, Array, this, Byte
from construct_typed import TypedContainer, Subcon, TypedStruct

class Image(TypedContainer):
    signature: Subcon(Const(b"BMP"))
    width: Subcon(Int8ub())
    height: Subcon(Int8ub())
    pixels: Subcon(Array(cs.this.width * cs.this.height, Byte()))

format = TypedStruct(Image)
obj = Image(width=3, height=2, pixels=[7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13])
print(format.build(obj))
print(format.parse(b"BMP\x03\x02\x07\x08\t\x0b\x0c\r"))

An example of the added TypedEnum class: