xbrl-rs

A Rust library for parsing and validating XBRL documents. This library expects UTF-8 encoded XML files.

• What is XBRL?
• Features
• Usage
• Testing
• Conformance
• Benchmarks
• References

What is XBRL?

XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) is a standard for financial reporting.

The main concepts of XBRL are:

• taxonomy: the dictionary and rulebook that defines how financial and business information is labeled, structured, and related
• instance document: a company's actual reported data
• discoverable taxonomy set (DTS): the full set of taxonomy files that define all concepts referenced in an instance

Features

• XBRL Instance: parse facts, contexts, units
• XBRL Taxonomy: parse XSD schemas and linkbases (presentation, calculation, definition, labels, references)
• XBRL Validation: validate XBRL instance against XBRL taxonomy
• XBRL View: view facts of an XBRL instance, formatted according to the presentation linkbase

Usage

To download XBRL taxonomies, feature download needs to be enabled.

// Parse XBRL instance document from XML file
let instance = InstanceDocument::from_file("/path/to/financial_report.xml").unwrap();

// Validate instance document against taxonomy
let schema_refs = instance.schema_refs();
let taxonomy_root = "/path/to/taxonomies";
let loader = TaxonomyLoader::new().unwrap();
loader
    .download_all(schema_refs.iter().map(String::as_str), taxonomy_root)
    .unwrap();
let taxonomy = TaxonomySet::discover(schema_refs.to_vec(), taxonomy_root.into()).unwrap();
let validation_result = instance.validate(&taxonomy);

Testing

Some integration tests require the downloaded taxonomy files in test_data/taxonomies: cargo run --bin download_taxonomies --release

# Run unit tests
cargo test --lib

# Run integration tests
cargo test --test '*'

# Run integration tests with full taxonomy
cargo test --features taxonomy-test

Conformance

Conformance tests are based on the XBRL International Conformance Suite (2025-07-16). The downloaded test suite is required in test_data/conformance to run the conformance tests.

# Run conformance tests
cargo test conformance_suite --features conformance-test

Benchmarks

The package manager uv is required to run the Python benchmarks.

# Rust (HTML report is generated in target/criterion/report/index.html)
cargo bench

# Python (uv creates venv in ~/.cache/uv and installs arelle-release)
uv run benches/bench_xbrl.py

Benchmarked libraries:

• Arelle (v2.38.13)
• xbrl-rs (v0.1.1)

DTS discovery for German HGB taxonomies (2020-04-01, ~50 MB of XSD/XML files).

Benchmark single_dts_2020: 1 entry point

Benchmark full_dts_2020: 6 entry points combined into one DTS

References

• XBRL International
• XBRL Specifications
• XBRL Deutschland e.V.