taped

A lightweight cursor for non-linear parsing of byte slices.

Overview

Tape wraps a byte slice with a position cursor, providing methods for scanning, backtracking, and consuming bytes without allocating.

Originally developed as the byte reader for bincake, extracted as a standalone primitive after the same pattern appeared across multiple projects.

Example

use taped::Tape;

let data = b"hello world";
let mut tape = Tape::new(data);

tape.seek(|&b| b == b' '); // advance to space
let word = tape.consume(|&b| b != b' '); // consume "hello"
assert_eq!(word, b"hello");

When to use this

• Writing a parser for a binary or text format
• Scanning byte sequences without regex or nom
• Anywhere you need backtracking via cheap position snapshots (tape.clone())

When not to use this

• Full parser combinator framework → use nom or winnow
• Lexer generation → use logos
• Async byte streams → use tokio::io::AsyncBufRead