PDBparse is a GPL-licensed library for parsing Microsoft PDB files. Support for these is already available within Windows through the Debug Interface Access API, however, this interface is not usable on other operating systems.

PDB files are arranged into streams, each of which contains a specific bit of debug information; for example, stream 1 contains general information on the PDB file, and stream 2 contains information on data structures.

Currently, there is support for Microsoft PDB version 7 files (Vista and most Windows XP symbols) as well as version 2 (Windows 2000 and some XP symbols) At the moment, only two stream types are supported: the root index stream, which describes where to find the other streams in the file, and the type info stream, which gives information on a program's data structures.

The open-source library Construct is used to perform the low-level parsing, and is required to run the code.