Sphinx Objects.inv Encoder/Decoder

When documentation is built using, e.g., Sphinx’s StandaloneHTMLBuilder, an inventory of the named objects in the documentation set is dumped to a file called objects.inv in the html build directory. This file is read by intersphinx when generating links in other documentation.

Since version 1.0 of Sphinx (~July 2010), the data in these objects.inv inventories is compressed by zlib (presumably to reduce storage requirements and improve download speeds; “version 2”), whereas prior to that date the data was left uncompressed (“version 1”). This compression renders the files non-human-readable. It is the purpose of this package to enable quick and simple encoding/decoding of these files.

In particular, sphobjinv was developed to satisfy two primary use cases:

1. Searching and inspection of objects.inv contents in order to identify how to properly insert intersphinx references.
   
   
2. Assembly of new objects.inv files in order to allow intersphinx cross-referencing of other documentation sets that were not created by Sphinx.

Sphinx Objects.inv Encoder/Decoder is available on PyPI under sphobjinv:

pip install sphobjinv

The package is configured for use both as a command-line script and as a Python package.

The project source repository is on GitHub: bskinn/sphobjinv.