gridio

Rust-powered TextGrid parsing for Python. gridio offers user-friendly APIs with high performance for manipulating Praat TextGrid files.

Why gridio?

• High Performance – Built with Rust, gridio is designed for speed and efficiency, outperforming pure Python implementations as well as bindings to Praat's C++ core.
• Flexible APIs – Whether you prefer working with DataFrames, object-oriented structures, or JSON-like data, gridio has you covered.

Quick Start

I want simplicity

No structures. No classes. Just load and save DataFrames.

from gridio import textgrid_to_df, df_to_textgrid

df = textgrid_to_df("data/short_format.TextGrid")
print(df.head())

df_to_textgrid(df, "output.TextGrid", file_type="short")

I want full control

You can manipulate TextGrid files with a OOP-style API.

from gridio import TextGrid, Tier, IntervalItem

tg: TextGrid = TextGrid.from_file("data/long_format.TextGrid")
phones: Tier = tg.get_tier("phone")
new_item: IntervalItem = IntervalItem(1.23, 1.45, "ah")
phones.insert_item(new_item, index=0)

tg.save("edited.TextGrid", file_type="long")

No worry about performance, all of those OOP objects are lazy created from raw data only when accessed.

You can even work with a JSON-like data structure.

With textgrid_to_data and data_to_textgrid, convert between TextGrid files and nested lists/dicts. They're easy to serialize (e.g., to JSON) and manipulate programmatically.

from gridio import textgrid_to_data, data_to_textgrid

data = textgrid_to_data("data/long_format.TextGrid")
print(data[0], data[1])  # global tmin/tmax
first_tier = data[2][0]
print(first_tier[0], first_tier[2][:2])

data_to_textgrid(data, "copy.TextGrid")

Install

You can install gridio via pip:

pip install gridio

Or if you want to build from source, make sure you have Rust and maturin installed, then run:

maturin develop

Benchmarks

We benchmark gridio against two popular TextGrid parsing libraries: textgrid (a pure Python implementation) and parselmouth (Python bindings for Praat).

The benchmarks focus on two common tasks: - constructing in-memory TextGrid objects - converting TextGrids to Pandas DataFrames

The results are summarized below:

Package	Task	Mean (s)	Std Dev (s)	Speedup
gridio	construct	0.984	0.042	1.0x
textgrid	construct	8.555	0.031	8.7x
parselmouth	construct	206.68	3.39	210.0x
gridio	to_df	1.264	0.014	1.0x
textgrid	to_df	10.143	0.945	8.0x
parselmouth	to_df	220.11	5.23	174.1x