[Python-Dev] Zipfile and tarfile (original) (raw)

Itamar Shtull-Trauring twisted@itamarst.org
Sun, 14 Apr 2002 18:13:14 +0300

Gustavo Niemeyer wrote:

I'd rather choose a default interface similar where possible to that of zipfile. This makes it easy to include support to tar.gz in programs already supporting zipfile, and also creates some standardization. I'm including python-dev in the discussion to know what they think about this

Well, there's a problem with this - zipfile currently gives no way for users to access a file in the zip, except as a string. So, if you've got a 20MB file in your ZIP, and you want to read it in Python, you end up with a 20MB string object. I therefore think that as far as reading ZIP files, Python is very very broken, so limiting tarfile to that API isn't a great idea.

I submitted a patch that solved this, which was rejected since I didn't write enough test code or documentation:

https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=424856&group_id=5470&atid=305470

So, tarfile should use this updated API for compatability - one day I'll find the time to write those tests and docs. Meanwhile a version of zipfile.py with this feature can be found at http://itamarst.org/software/zipfile.py