Introduction

borsh-construct is an implementation of the Borsh binary serialization format for Python projects.

Borsh stands for Binary Object Representation Serializer for Hashing. It is meant to be used in security-critical projects as it prioritizes consistency, safety, speed, and comes with a strict specification.

borsh-construct is built on top of the very powerful construct library, so it is strongly recommended that you have a look at the basics of construct before using borsh-construct.

Who is this for?

This library was built with the NEAR and Solana blockchains in mind: the only obvious reason to use borsh-construct currently is to write client code for those blockchains, as they typically expect Borsh serialization.

You may find other reasons to use borsh-construct, but it is worth noting that the Borsh spec is written from a Rust perspective, so if you're not interacting with a Rust project then Borsh may not make sense.

Installation

pip install borsh-construct

Alternatively, using conda/mamba:

mamba install borsh-construct -c conda-forge

Usage

Since borsh-construct is built with construct, it serializes objects using .build and deserializes them using .parse. For example:

>>> from borsh_construct import U8, String, CStruct
>>> animal = CStruct(
...     "name" / String,
...     "legs" / U8
... )
>>> animal.build({"name": "Ferris", "legs": 6})
b'\x06\x00\x00\x00Ferris\x06'
>>> animal.parse(b'\x06\x00\x00\x00Ferris\x06')
Container(name=u'Ferris', legs=6)