This project is no longer maintained and has been archived.

Multicodec implementation in Python

multicodec is a self-describing multiformat, it wraps other formats with a tiny bit of self-description.

A multicodec identifier is both a varint and the code identifying the following data, this means that the most significant bit of every multicodec code is reserved to signal the continuation.

You can check the table here for the list of supported codecs by py-multicodec.

• Free software: MIT license
• Documentation: https://py-multicodec.readthedocs.io.
• Python versions: 3.5, 3.6

$ pip install py-multicodec

>>> from multicodec import add_prefix, remove_prefix, get_codec
>>> # adding a prefix to existing data
>>> add_prefix('sha2-256', b'EiC5TSe5k00')
b'\x12EiC5TSe5k00'
>>> # removing prefix from prefixed data
>>> remove_prefix(b'\x12EiC5TSe5k00')
EiC5TSe5k00
>>> # get codec used to prefix the prefixed data
>>> get_codec(b'\x12EiC5TSe5k00')
'sha2-256'

Updating the lookup table is done with a script. The source of truth is the multicodec default table. Update the table with running:

$ curl -X GET https://raw.githubusercontent.com/multiformats/multicodec/master/table.csv | ./tools/update-table.py