PBF

Generated by scripts/gen-format-pages.py from docs/data/format-metadata/, FILE_FORMATS.csv and docs/formats-master.csv. Do not edit by hand: change the source, then run the script.

OpenStreetMap PBF Preview.

At a glance

How much Poka reads

B4 Summary. The container and metadata are read and summarised (counts, properties, structure), but the main content is not rendered.

Confidence: medium (the reviewer read the code). Basis: Reviewed 2026-10-26: read parsers/poka-pbf-osm/src/main.rs (362 lines) and plugin.json. No unit tests or tests/samples.rs; the corpus has no .pbf and .osm.pbf sample. Covers .pbf and .osm.pbf. The card walks the block stream without decompressing and shows the block counts, OSMData blocks, the declared uncompressed size, and from the OSMHeader the writing program, source, required and optional features, bounding box and replication timestamp and sequence. Judgement: B4: the file's structure and header are decoded, but no map data is.

What Poka does not read

• Nodes, ways and relations are not decoded or counted (the blocks are not decompressed)
• Nothing is drawn
• Other formats that use .pbf (Mapbox vector tiles, generic protobuf) are refused or misread (judgement from the code)

Libraries

Libraries Poka uses or has assessed for this format, with the status, licence and language the registry records.

• osmpbf (candidate; MIT OR Apache-2.0; Rust; https://github.com/b-r-u/osmpbf) — Rust reader for *.osm.pbf with lazy decoding and optional parallelism; default zlib backend is pure Rust (miniz_oxide).
• osmpbfreader (candidate; WTFPL; Rust; https://github.com/TeXitoi/osmpbfreader-rs) — Read OpenStreetMap PBF files in rust.; v0.19.1, updated 2025-05-26; matched on lib.rs, not tested

Sources

• parsers/poka-pbf-osm/src/main.rs
• parsers/poka-pbf-osm/plugin.json