Kaitai Struct Engine for Python

Kaitai Struct Engine is a REST API web service, providing virtual machine which allows to:

• load Kaitai Struct specification (in .ksy form), compiling it into target language (in this case - Python) and importing into the engine
• load data files that are supposed to be parsed according to the spec
• run the compiled parser on provided data files
• explore the parsed data in a tree-like manner

This repository contains a Python implementation of the engine. It conforms to the Kaitai Struct Engine OpenAPI standard.

It's not supposed to be used directly by end users, but rather visualizers can attach to it and provide a user-friendly interface, thus decoupling UI (in the visualizer) and parsing logic (in the engine).

Developer workflow

# Set up Python venv (once after checkout)
python3 -m venv env

# Activate Python venv (every time in a new shell)
. env/bin/activate

# Restore dependencies and install package in a developer-friendly way (once after checkout)
python3 -m pip install -e ./

# Run server
python3 -m kaitai_struct_python_engine

# Restore dependencies + `[tests]` suffix allows to install optional dependencies for running tests
python3 -m pip install -e ./[tests]

# Run tests
pytest