pyxx.files

Code for reading, writing, and processing files

The pyxx.files module is intended to assist with processing files. It contains a set of classes intended to represent generic file types (binary files and text files), as well as functions to perform common file-related operations (such as computing file hashes).

An important concept about the classes in pyxx.files is that files are considered a data structure for storing information as a sequence of characters. Files are not necessarily linked to a location on the disk (although they can be). Therefore, classes in pyxx.files can, but do not necessarily, have an assigned path.

The intention of this module is that by subclassing the included classes, the basic structure should be provided to manage file content, and a few very general functions are provided. Developers can add custom methods to subclasses specific to their file format. For instance, if creating a ShellScript subclass to parse shell scripts, a ShellScript.read() method might be added that parses the file, extracting the shebang line and storing the interpreter in an attribute ShellScript.interpreter.

Thus, the focus of the pyxx.files classes and subclasses should, in most cases, be on processing context-specific file content, and less focused on specific files on the disk (Python’s built-in pathlib, shutil, and os modules are already well-suited to these purposes).

File Objects

The classes below are intended to represent files (existing on the file system or not). Once a class instance is created, various read/write and content processing methods are available to perform common file-related tasks.

File([path])	Base class for processing files of any type (text or binary)
BinaryFile([path])	Base class for processing binary files
TextFile([path, comment_chars])	Base class for processing text files

File Hashes

The functions in this section can be used to compute and analyze file hashes.

compute_file_hash(file[, hash_function])

Computes a file hash