FlexBuffers-Python

This is a collection of Python classes to read and write FlexBuffers

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⚠️ This library is designed to be convenient way for Python developers to read and write FlexBuffers. It is not optimized for performance!

Usage

Building a FlexBuffer

FlxBuilder class lets you serialise a python object into a FlexBuffer by using the fromValue static method:

FlxBuilder.fromValue({"a": 12})

This expression will return a bytes object. which contains the FlexBuffer of the passed map. For more examples please have a look at Builder Unit Tests and Roundtrip Tests

As this implementation is not designed to be performance critical. I decided to keep all deduplication strategies on by default. The deduplication strategies include:

• String deduplication
• Key deduplication
• Keys Vector deduplication

Reading a FlexBuffer

FlxValue class lets you access the data inside of the FlexBuffer. Please use the static from_bytes method to instantiate a FlxValue object by passing it a bytes object:

flx = FlxValue.from_bytes(buffer)

If the buffer was representing just a single value, you can access this value by calling the value() method. In case that the buffer was representing a Vector or a Map you can use the [] operator to access the inner FlxValue and than use the value() method to exctract the actual value. e.g.:

flx["age"].value()
flx["address"]["city"].value()

The FlxValue class also implements __itter__ method ands so can be itterated upon. For even more convinience there is a to_object method which does deep traversal and converts the buffer into a fully materialised Python object. This is however is not desirable if you need to access only a few values out of the buffer.

And last but not least, there is a json() method which let's you convert the FlexBuffer into minified JSON. This option is specifically interesting, when you need to debug.

Please have a look at FlexValue Unit Tests and Roundtrip Tests to see more examples.