tibs 0.11.0

A sleek Python library for binary data.

A sleek Python library for binary data

   

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tibs is a simple but powerful Python library for creating, interpreting and manipulating binary data. It is 100% written in Rust to give it excellent performance, and is from the author of the bitstring library.

Documentation

The full documentation is available on Read the Docs.

Install

pip install tibs

Tibs works with Python 3.8 and later. There are pre-built wheels for most common platforms; if there are issues then please let me know.

Why use it?

• Store bit sequences of any length, not just whole bytes.
• Construct from strings, bytes, bools, integers, floats, random data or repeated typed values.
• Slice at bit positions and interpret each slice as bytes, ints, floats, binary, octal or hex.
• Read little-endian values and LSB0-labelled fields without manually reshuffling the source data.
• Search, count, replace, rotate, reverse, byte-swap, set and unset bits with Rust-backed operations.
• Use immutable Tibs for cheap slicing and stable values; switch to Mutibs when in-place edits are better.

A taster

One way to get to know the library is to start a Python interactive session and try a small binary record. Tibs is immutable, like bytes; Mutibs is the mutable version for in-place editing.

>>> from tibs import Tibs, Mutibs

>>> # Four flag bits, a 12-bit integer field, then two payload bytes.
>>> packet = Tibs.from_joined(["0b1010", Tibs.from_u(3200, 12), b"OK"])
>>> packet
Tibs('0xac804f4b')
>>> len(packet)
32

>>> # Slice at bit positions, then interpret each slice however you need.
>>> packet[:4].bin
'1010'
>>> packet[4:16].to_u()
3200
>>> packet[16:].bytes
b'OK'

>>> # Search and test using strings, bytes, booleans or other Tibs values.
>>> packet.find("0x4f", byte_aligned=True)
16
>>> packet.find_all("0b10")
[0, 2, 5, 8, 17, 23, 25, 28]

>>> # Convert to Mutibs when you want to patch the data in-place.
>>> patched = packet.to_mutibs()
>>> patched[4:16] = Tibs.from_u(2047, 12)
>>> patched[-8:] = b"!"
>>> patched
Mutibs('0xa7ff4f21')
>>> patched[4:16].to_u(), patched[-16:].bytes
(2047, b'O!')

>>> # The same operations are designed to scale to large bit sequences.
>>> Tibs.from_random(1_000_000, seed=b"readme").count(1)
500480

This only scratches the surface: the docs cover construction from ints, floats, bytes and strings; endianness; searching and replacing; rotations; bit indexing; and more worked examples.

For more information see the full documentation.

Project status

Tibs is currently beta: API changes are still possible when they improve the design, but the project is already performant and stable enough to be used as the core of the bitstring library, and it has millions of downloads per month.

There are over 600 unit tests, including Hypothesis tests and performance benchmarks. The Rust extension is built with PyO3 and supports Python 3.8 and later.

For more examples and the full API reference, see the documentation. The runnable examples also live in the examples/ directory.

I hope to release version 1.0 before the end of 2026.

Credits

The tibs library was created by Scott Griffiths and is released under the MIT License.

The Tibs cat artwork was created by Ada Griffiths and is not covered by the software license. All rights reserved.