NIBArchive-Parser

Parser implementation of NeXTSTEP Interface Builder (NIB) files in Python3.

NIBArchive

The .nib file is primarily associated with Interface Builder, a graphical user interface (GUI) design tool used to create the visual layout of user interfaces for applications. The purpose of a NIB file is to store the information about the user interface elements, their properties, and their relationships with each other.

The file format has been described in detail in the nibsqueeze repository.

Installation

Just use pip:

$ pip install nibarchive

and to build the docs you need make to be installed:

$ pip install -r docs/requirements.txt
$ cd docs && make html

Usage

The python package provided with this repository supports parsing NIB archives into an object model. More detailed information about the implementation and fields of each class, please refer to the documentation available on Github-Pages.

Parsing NIB files

As the NIBArchiveParser only accepts IOBase objects, we can either parse opened files directly or use io.BytesIO for a reader on existing byte structures.

from nibarchive import NIBArchiveParser

# Create the parser instance
parser = NIBArchiveParser(verify=True)

# Parse an input file from scratch
with open("path/to/file.nib", "rb") as fp:
    archive: NIBArchive = parser.parse(fp)

Or with BytesIO:

from io import BytesIO

# assue the file content is stored here
buffer = bytes(...)
parser = NIBArchiveParser()

# parse using BytesIO wrapper class
archive = parser.parse(BytesIO(buffer))

Working with NIBArchive objects

At this point we can use the returned object to inspect the files content. But, the parser does not organize the returned archive, so we have to do it afterwards:

# Get an object
obj: NIBObject = archive.objects[0]

# Get the object's class name
class_name: ClassName = archive.get_class_name(obj)

# Retrieve the object's values
values: list[NIBValue] = archive.get_object_values(obj)
for value in values:
    # Each value is mapped to a NIBKey
    key: NIBKey = archive.get_value_key(value)

There is a convienient method named get_object_items which automatically maps all values of an object to their corresponding keys. The return value is of type dict[NIBKey, NIBValue]

License

Distributed under the GNU GPLv3. See LICENSE for more information.