python-javaobj is a python library that provides functions for reading and writing (writing is WIP currently) Java objects serialized or will be deserialized by ObjectOutputStream. This form of object representation is a standard data interchange format in Java world.

The javaobj module exposes an API familiar to users of the standard library marshal, pickle and json modules.

This project is a fork of python-javaobj by Volodymyr Buell, originally from Google Code and now hosted on GitHub.

This fork intends to work both on Python 2.7 and Python 3.4+.

Since version 0.4.0, two implementations of the parser are available:

• v1: the classic implementation of javaobj, with a work in progress implementation of a writer.
• v2: the new implementation, a port of jdeserialize with support of the object transformer (with a new API) and the numpy arrays.

As of version 0.2.0, the notion of object transformer from the original project as been replaced by an object creator.

The object creator is called before the deserialization. This allows to store the reference of the converted object before deserializing it, and avoids a mismatch between the referenced object and the transformed one.

As of version 0.2.3, bytes arrays are loaded as a bytes object instead of an array of integers.

• Java object instance unmarshaling
• Java classes unmarshaling
• Primitive values unmarshaling
• Automatic conversion of Java Collections to python ones (HashMap => dict, ArrayList => list, etc.)
• Basic marshalling of simple Java objects

• Python >= 2.7 or Python >= 3.4
• enum34 and typing when using Python <= 3.4 (installable with pip)
• Maven 2+ (for building test data of serialized objects. You can skip it if you do not plan to run tests.py)

Unmarshalling of Java serialised object:

import javaobj

with open("obj5.ser", "rb") as fd:
    jobj = fd.read()

pobj = javaobj.loads(jobj)
print(pobj)

Or, you can use Unmarshaller object directly:

import javaobj

with open("objCollections.ser", "rb") as fd:
    marshaller = javaobj.JavaObjectUnmarshaller(fd)
    pobj = marshaller.readObject()

    print(pobj.value, "should be", 17)
    print(pobj.next, "should be", True)

    pobj = marshaller.readObject()

The objects and methods provided by javaobj module are shortcuts to the javaobj.v1 package

Unmarshalling of Java serialised object:

import javaobj.v2 as javaobj

with open("obj5.ser", "rb") as fd:
    jobj = fd.read()

pobj = javaobj.loads(jobj)
print(pobj)

WIP