bitstring is a Python library to help make the creation and analysis of all types of bit-level binary data as simple and efficient as possible. It has been actively maintained since 2006.
The library has has now been downloaded over 100 million times! ✨ 
[!NOTE] To see what been added, improved or fixed, and also to see what's coming in the next version, see the release notes.
Overview
- Efficiently store and manipulate binary data in idiomatic Python.
- Create bitstrings from hex, octal, binary, files, formatted strings, bytes, integers and floats of different endiannesses.
- Powerful binary packing and unpacking functions.
- Bit-level slicing, joining, searching, replacing and more.
- Create and manipulate arrays of fixed-length bitstrings.
- Read from and interpret bitstrings as streams of binary data.
- Rich API - chances are that whatever you want to do there's a simple and elegant way of doing it.
- Open source software, released under the MIT licence.
Documentation
Extensive documentation for the bitstring library is available. Some starting points are given below:
There is also an introductory walkthrough notebook on binder.
Examples
Installation
$ pip install bitstring
Creation
>>> from bitstring import Bits, BitArray, BitStream, pack
>>> a = BitArray(bin='00101')
>>> b = Bits(a_file_object)
>>> c = BitArray('0xff, 0b101, 0o65, uint6=22')
>>> d = pack('intle16, hex=a, 0b1', 100, a='0x34f')
>>> e = pack('<16h', *range(16))
Different interpretations, slicing and concatenation
>>> a = BitArray('0x3348')
>>> a.hex, a.bin, a.uint, a.float, a.bytes
('3348', '0011001101001000', 13128, 0.2275390625, b'3H')
>>> a[10:3:-1].bin
'0101100'
>>> '0b100' + 3*a
BitArray('0x866906690669, 0b000')
Reading data sequentially
>>> b = BitStream('0x160120f')
>>> b.read(12).hex
'160'
>>> b.pos = 0
>>> b.read('uint12')
352
>>> b.readlist('uint12, bin3')
[288, '111']
Searching, inserting and deleting
>>> c = BitArray('0b00010010010010001111') # c.hex == '0x1248f'
>>> c.find('0x48')
(8,)
>>> c.replace('0b001', '0xabc')
>>> c.insert('0b0000', pos=3)
>>> del c[12:16]
Arrays of fixed-length formats
>>> from bitstring import Array
>>> a = Array('uint7', [9, 100, 3, 1])
>>> a.data
BitArray('0x1390181')
>>> a[::2] *= 5
>>> a
Array('uint7', [45, 100, 15, 1])
Copyright (c) 2006 - 2025 Scott Griffiths
1 maintainer
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