Change Log

This is a log of changes made to the library over time. For planned upcoming changes, please check the GitHub issue list and release milestones.

Version Release Notes

Release notes for the space_packet_parser library

v5.1.0 (unreleased)

  • BUGFIX: Fix kbps calculation in packet generator for showing progress.

  • Add support for string and float encoded enumerated lookup parameters.

  • Add properties to extract the CCSDS Header items from the RawPacketData object directly. e.g. RawPacketData.apid

  • Add a create_ccsds_packet function that can create a CCSDS Packet with the given header items and data. This is useful for creating mock packets in testing and experimentation for creating debugging streams as needed.

  • Add a ccsds_packet_generator() function that iterates through raw bytes and yields individual CCSDS packets.

  • Add continuation packet support to the XTCE parsing and packet generation. This adds logic to concatenate packet data fields together across successive packets (if there was too much data to fit in a single CCSDS packet or it was logically better to split by other teams).

    • Add warnings if packets are out of sequence within a given apid.

    • Add ability to remove secondary header bytes from subsequent packets. definition.packet_generator(data, combine_segmented_packets=True, secondary_header_bytes=4)

  • Add a command line interface (spp) to enable quick and easy access to some common tasks and utilities.

  • Add function to directly create an xarray.DataSet from a packet file and XTCE definition. e.g. space_packet_parser.xarr.create_dataset([packets1, packets2, ...], definition)

  • BUGFIX: update list of allowed float encodings to match XTCE spec

  • Add benchmark tests and documentation overview of benchmarks.

v5.0.1 (released)

  • BUGFIX: Allow raw_value representation for enums with falsy raw values. Previously these defaulted to the enum label.

  • If a packet definition parses too few bits, a UserWarning is now emitted instead of a logger warning.

v5.0.0 (released)

  • BREAKING: Main API changed. No need to create separate definition and parser objects any more. Create only a definition from your XTCE document and instead of my_parser.generator, use my_packet_definition.packet_generator.

  • BREAKING: Removed CSV-based packet definition support. We may indirectly support this in the future via a utility for converting CSV definitions to XTCE.

  • BREAKING: Separated out logical pieces into separate modules rather than everything living within the xtcedef module. This means user imports may be different now.

  • BREAKING: Replace bitstring objects with native Python bytes objects

    • Remove dependency on the bitstring library

    • Much faster parsing speed

    • Users that are passing bitstring.ConstBitStream objects to generator will need to pass a binary filelike object instead

  • BREAKING: The ParsedDataItem class has been removed and the derived values are being returned now. The raw_value is stored as an attribute on the returned object. The other items can be accessed through the packet definition object my_packet_definition.named_parameters["my_item"].short_description

  • BREAKING: The return type of BinaryDataEncoding is now the raw bytes. To get the previous behavior you can convert the data to an integer and then format it as a binary string. f"{int.from_bytes(data, byteorder='big'):0{len(data)*8}b}"

  • BREAKING: Removed word_size kwarg from packet generator method. We expect all binary data to be integer number of bytes.

  • BREAKING: Changed packet_generator kwarg skip_header_bits to skip_header_bytes.

  • Fixed incorrect parsing of StringDataEncoding elements. Raw string values are now returned as byte buffers. Derived string values contain python string objects.

  • The CCSDSPacket class is now a dictionary subclass, enabling direct lookup of items from the Packet itself.

  • A RawPacketData class has been added that is a subclass of bytes. It keeps track of the current parsing location and enables reading of bit lengths as integers or raw bytes.

  • Fix EnumeratedParameterType to handle duplicate labels

  • Add error reporting for unsupported and invalid parameter types

  • Add support for MIL-1750A floats (32-bit only)

v4.2.0 (released)

  • Parse short and long descriptions of parameters

  • Implement equality checking for SequenceContainer objects and Parameter objects

  • Include parameter short description and long description in ParsedDataItems

  • Add support for AbsoluteTimeParameterType and RelativeTimeParameterType

  • Add support for BooleanParameterType

  • Drop support for bitstring <4.0.1

  • Support BooleanExpression in a ContextCalibrator

  • Default read size is changed to a full file read on file-like objects

  • Improve error handling for invalid/unsupported parameter types

v4.1.1 (released)

  • Allow Python 3.12

v4.1.0 (released)

  • Bugfix in fill_buffer to allow compatibility with Bitstring 4.1.1

  • Add informative error if user tries to parse a TextIO object

  • Add documentation of some common issues and add changelog to documentation

v4.0.2 (released)

  • Documentation updates for Read The Docs

v4.0.1 (released)

  • Modify API for PacketParser.generator to accept a ConstBitStream or a BufferedReader or a socket

    • This will allow us to keep memory overhead of reading a binary stream to almost zero

  • Add examples directory to help users

  • Add CITATION.cff

  • Add CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md

Historical Changes (lasp_packets)

Changes documented in v3.0 and earlier correspond to development efforts undertaken before this library was moved to GitHub (it was previously known as lasp_packets). None of the git history is available for these versions as the git history was truncated in preparation for the move to Github to prevent accidental release of non-public example data which may be (but probably isn’t) present in historical commits.

v3.0 (released publicly)

  • Add a discussion of optimization to the documentation

  • Change license to BSD3 and CU copyright

  • Add support for Python 3.10 and 3.11

  • Remove support for Python 3.6

  • Redesign the way the parser interprets the SequenceContainer inheritance structure

    • This allows polymorphic packet structures based on flags in telemetry

    • Previous functionality is preserved

    • csvdef module still uses the legacy flattened_containers representation

  • Add Parser.generator kwargs tdocs/source/index.rsto aid in debugging

  • Add kwarg to only parse CCSDS headers and skip the user data

  • Add optional progress bar that prints to stdout when parsing a packets file.

v2.1 (released publicly)

  • Update documentation on release process

v2.0 (released internally)

  • Add link in readme to v1.2 Aug 2021 of XTCE spec

  • Add support for < xtce:DiscreteLookupList >

  • Add support for < xtce:Condition >

  • Add support for < xtce:BooleanExpression >

  • Push the evaluation logic for ParameterTypes down to DataEncodings

  • Add option to skip an additional header on each packet

  • Modify RestrictionCriteria parser to evaluate MatchCriteria elements

  • Add word size as an optional parameter to the parser

  • Add an optional header name remapping parameter to the parser

  • Add support for BooleanExpression in a RestrictionCriteria element

v1.3 (released internally)

  • Expand version compatiblity for python >=3.6, <4

v1.2 (released internally)

  • Remove unnecessary warning about float data types being IEEE formatted.

  • Switch package manager to Poetry.

  • Add support for instantiating definitions with pathlib.Path objects.

v1.1.0 (released internally)

  • Add support for CSV-based packet definitions (contribution by Michael Chambliss).

v1.0 (released internally)

  • Add support for all parameter types.

  • Add support for all data encodings.

  • Add support for calibrators and contextual calibrators.

  • Add support for variable length strings given by termination characters or preceding length fields.

  • Add support for variable length binary data fields in utf-8, utf-16-le, and utf-16-be.

  • Add build and release documentation to readme.