This package provides python bindings for some of EUMETSAT’s PublicDecompWT tools.

With pyPublicDecompWT compressed xRIT (HRIT/LRIT) files can now be decompressed in-memory, directly with python! Currently, only bindings for the tool xRITDecompress are available. If you need other classes or functionalities, please open a pull-request!

This repository contains / mirrors the source code for the complete PublicDecompWT tool, as well. Additionally, we provide CMake build files.

Install pyxRITDecompress via pip:

pip install pyPublicDecompWT

The following command will verify if the installation succeeded:

python -c "import pyPublicDecompWT"

Building from sources requires C/C , including compiler and standard library support.

• C/C Compiler, e.g. GNU-GCC
• CMake
• pybind11

from pyPublicDecompWT import xRITDecompress

# the file to decompress
compressed_file_path = "test-data/compressed_ref/H-000-MSG4__-MSG4________-HRV______-000012___-202105260000-C_"

# Legacy decompression on disk of given file path,
#  this will write the decompressed file to the current working directory
xRITDecompress(compressed_file_path)

# In-memory decompression of given buffer
with open(compressed_file_path, mode="rb") as fh:
    xRIT = xRITDecompress()
    xRIT.decompress(fh.read())
    uncompressed = xRIT.data()

To comply with the original PublicDecompWT project, the pyPublicDecompWT package provides a xRITDecompress executable as well. Our xRITDecompress script is a near drop-in replacement for the original.

There are two changes:

• We are not writing Decompressed file ... to stdout
• As per UNIX convention, the short option -s is separated by a space, not by a colon.

The former can be enabled by passing -v to xRITDecompress, however, the latter can't be emulated. Thus, the command line call has to be changed.

In addition to the -s option we added a positional argument files to enable batch processing of (multiple) files in a single call.

$ xRITDecompress --help
usage: xRITDecompress [-h] [--version] [-v] [-s FILE] [files ...]

Command line tool for manual decompression of HRIT/LRIT files.

positional arguments:
  files          Name of compressed HRIT/LRIT file(s)

options:
  -h, --help     show this help message and exit
  --version      show program`s version number and exit
  -v, --verbose  Verbose mode
  -s FILE        Name of compressed HRIT/LRIT file

The versioning scheme of the python bindings is the PublicDecompWT version with the additional version of the python bindings.

Example: Version 1 of the python bindings for PublicDecompWT version 2.8.1 is 2.8.1.1