Crate niffler

Expand description

niffler

Simple and transparent support for compressed files.

This library provides two main features:

sniffs out compression formats from input files and return a Read trait object ready for consumption.
Create a Writer initialized with compression ready for writing.

The goal is to lower the barrier to open and use a file, especially in bioinformatics workflows.

Example

use niffler::{Error, compression};
let mut buffer = Vec::new();

{
  let mut writer = niffler::get_writer(Box::new(&mut buffer), compression::Format::Gzip, niffler::Level::Nine)?;
  writer.write_all(b"hello")?;
}


let (mut reader, compression) = niffler::get_reader(Box::new(&buffer[..]))?;

let mut contents = String::new();
reader.read_to_string(&mut contents)?;

assert_eq!(compression, niffler::compression::Format::Gzip);
assert_eq!(contents, "hello");

By default all supported compression formats are enabled. If you’re working on systems that don’t support them you can disable default features and select the ones you want. For example, currently only gz is supported in Webassembly environments (because niffler depends on crates that have system dependencies for bz2 and lzma compression), so you can use this in your Cargo.toml to select only the gz support:

niffler = { version = "2.2.0", default-features = false, features = ["gz"] }

You can still use niffler::sniff() to find what is the compression format, even if any feature is disabled. But if you try to use niffler::get_reader for a disabled feature, it will throw a runtime error.

Backends features

The libraries that are used for decompression provide a number of features that can have a significant impact on performance. Here is the list of features available with corresponding backend crates and features name in backend crates: