9. The “Other” Modules: snappy and protobuf

There are two digressive modules that are part of reading iWork ‘13 Numbers files. We could depend on other implementations. Instead, we’ve provided our own implementation to reduce the dependencies.

It’s sensible to use more sophisticated imports in the workbook package to properly handle various kinds of Snappy compression and Protobuf representation implementations. In the same way that the various XML workbooks could be built on any of the Python XML modules.

However, it’s somewhat simpler for developers to rely only on Stingray and (optionally) xlrd.

• 9.1. Snappy Module – Unpacking iWork 13 files.
• 9.2. Protobuf Module – Unpacking iWork 13 files.