[Python-Dev] Re: tarfile (original) (raw)

David Ascher DavidA@ActiveState.com
Thu, 18 Apr 2002 14:15:59 -0700

Gustavo Niemeyer wrote:

What do you think about keeping the current zipfile semantics of read/write returning strings, and using your suggesion of extract() and add() to implement the new functionality of dumping to disk? We could even have some kind of Dumper class, which would be responsible for that task, and could be replaced by the user if necessary (personaly, I'm not against something like "read = extractstr" as well). I just want to point out that, when dealing with really large files (which are prime candidates for zipping =), there are significant benefits to being able to look at parts of a file in a zip archive without having to dump the file to disk. If you look at the gzip module, for example, you'll see that it provides a file-like interface to the data, without requiring it to be a file. This may be obvious to you, but the above paragraph made me want to be explicit.

--david ascher