Recently I needed to be able to determine the dimensions of SWF (Flash animation) files so I could embed them properly on a web page but I couldn’t immediately find something useful with Google that would perform the task. I am aware of the Hachoir project, but it seemed a bit overkill for my simple use case and a quick try with hachoir-metadata failed to parse my particular SWF file.

Luckily the container section of the SWF file format (which contains the metadata) is rather simple and writing a parser for it turned out to be a nice distraction from my normal duties. The result is hexagonit.swfheader which is a minimal package (no dependencies outside the standard library) that provides a single function that parses SWF files and returns the metadata.

The package comes also with a console script that you can use on the command line to quickly introspect local SWF files. In a buildout you’ll need to use the zc.recipe.egg:scripts recipe to get the script installed.