Adds the ability to collect and maintain the state of individual vessels over time

• introduce AISTracker class
  • adds the ability to collect and maintain the state of individual vessels over time
• closes #103
  • allows tag blocks to contain multiple : in field data

v2.4.0: parse leading tag blocks (#99)

• supports optional tag blocks for NMEA messages

v2.3.2

• bug fixes

removed unnecessary padding (`@`) from variable length text/data fields

• closes #94
  • removed unnecessary padding (@) from variable length text/data fields
  • introduced a new keyword variable_length to the bit_field method:
    • boolean value that defaults to False
    • marks fields as variable in length (width)
    • used by the encoder to decide whether to add trailing @s as padding

Gatehouse Wrappers

• closes #91
  • supports Gatehouse wrappers used to add extra information
• renames NMEAMessage to NMEASentence

ignores `NonPrintableCharacterException`

• ignores NonPrintableCharacterException exceptions when using stream readers
• such messages are simply skipped

v2.2.3: only raise an exception if non printable characters are passed to the…

Closes #88

• make the decoder more liberal by not raising an exception when the payload contains special characters
• replace the ValueError with a NonPrintableCharacterException in case that non printable characters are passed to the decode funtion

ensure that the encoding of messages is idempotent

• Closes #86
  • ensure that the payload is always identical - even for multiple encode/decode roundtrips
  • the turn field can now never be None and is instead an instance of the newly created TurnRate enum

ensure that the NMEA sentence length does not exceed 82 characters

ensure that the NMEA sentence length does not exceed 82 characters

Invalid checksums can optionally raise an exception

• introduces optional error_if_checksum_invalid keyword (default=False)

• adds the possibility to raise an exception if the checksum is invalid