bitstring is a Python module 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.

April 2024: bitstring 4.2.1 released.

New in version 4.2:

• Dropped support for Python 3.7. Minimum version is now 3.8.
• A new Dtype class can be optionally used to specify types.
• The bitstring.options object is now the preferred method for changing module options.
• New fromstring method as another way to create bitstrings from formatted strings.
• More types can now be pretty printed.
• A range of 8-bit, 6-bit and even 4-bit floating point formats added (beta):
• Performance improvements.

See the release notes for details. Please let me know if you encounter any problems.

• 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.

Extensive documentation for the bitstring module is available. Some starting points are given below:

• Overview
• Quick Reference
• Full Reference

There is also an introductory walkthrough notebook on binder.

To see what been added, improved or fixed, and also to see what's coming in the next version, see the release notes.

$ pip install bitstring

 >>> 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))

 >>> 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')

 >>> b = BitStream('0x160120f')
 >>> b.read(12).hex
 '160'
 >>> b.pos = 0
 >>> b.read('uint12')
 352
 >>> b.readlist('uint12, bin3')
 [288, '111']

 >>> c = BitArray('0b00010010010010001111')   # c.hex == '0x1248f'
 >>> c.find('0x48')
 (8,)
 >>> c.replace('0b001', '0xabc')
 >>> c.insert('0b0000', pos=3)
 >>> del c[12:16]

 >>> 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 - 2024 Scott Griffiths}