tarfile — Read and write tar archive files (original) (raw)

Source code: Lib/tarfile.py

The tarfile module makes it possible to read and write tar archives, including those using gzip, bz2 and lzma compression. Use the zipfile module to read or write .zip files, or the higher-level functions in shutil.

Some facts and figures:

• reads and writes gzip, bz2 and lzma compressed archives if the respective modules are available.
• read/write support for the POSIX.1-1988 (ustar) format.
• read/write support for the GNU tar format including longname and _longlink_extensions, read-only support for all variants of the sparse extension including restoration of sparse files.
• read/write support for the POSIX.1-2001 (pax) format.
• handles directories, regular files, hardlinks, symbolic links, fifos, character devices and block devices and is able to acquire and restore file information like timestamp, access permissions and owner.

Changed in version 3.3: Added support for lzma compression.

Changed in version 3.12: Archives are extracted using a filter, which makes it possible to either limit surprising/dangerous features, or to acknowledge that they are expected and the archive is fully trusted.

Changed in version 3.14: Set the default extraction filter to data, which disallows some dangerous features such as links to absolute paths or paths outside of the destination. Previously, the filter strategy was equivalent to fully_trusted.

tarfile.open(name=None, mode='r', fileobj=None, bufsize=10240, **kwargs)¶

Return a TarFile object for the pathname name. For detailed information on TarFile objects and the keyword arguments that are allowed, see TarFile Objects.

mode has to be a string of the form 'filemode[:compression]', it defaults to 'r'. Here is a full list of mode combinations:

Note that 'a:gz', 'a:bz2' or 'a:xz' is not possible. If _mode_is not suitable to open a certain (compressed) file for reading,ReadError is raised. Use mode 'r' to avoid this. If a compression method is not supported, CompressionError is raised.

If fileobj is specified, it is used as an alternative to a file objectopened in binary mode for name. It is supposed to be at position 0.

For modes 'w:gz', 'x:gz', 'w|gz', 'w:bz2', 'x:bz2','w|bz2', tarfile.open() accepts the keyword argument_compresslevel_ (default 9) to specify the compression level of the file.

For modes 'w:xz', 'x:xz' and 'w|xz', tarfile.open() accepts the keyword argument preset to specify the compression level of the file.

For special purposes, there is a second format for mode:'filemode|[compression]'. tarfile.open() will return a TarFileobject that processes its data as a stream of blocks. No random seeking will be done on the file. If given, fileobj may be any object that has aread() or write() method (depending on the mode) that works with bytes.bufsize specifies the blocksize and defaults to 20 * 512 bytes. Use this variant in combination with e.g. sys.stdin.buffer, a socketfile object or a tape device. However, such a TarFile object is limited in that it does not allow random access, see Examples. The currently possible modes:

Changed in version 3.5: The 'x' (exclusive creation) mode was added.

Changed in version 3.6: The name parameter accepts a path-like object.

Changed in version 3.12: The compresslevel keyword argument also works for streams.

Changed in version 3.14.0a7 (unreleased): The preset keyword argument also works for streams.

class tarfile.TarFile

Class for reading and writing tar archives. Do not use this class directly: use tarfile.open() instead. See TarFile Objects.

tarfile.is_tarfile(name)¶

Return True if name is a tar archive file, that the tarfilemodule can read. name may be a str, file, or file-like object.

Changed in version 3.9: Support for file and file-like objects.

The tarfile module defines the following exceptions:

exception tarfile.TarError¶

Base class for all tarfile exceptions.

exception tarfile.ReadError¶

Is raised when a tar archive is opened, that either cannot be handled by thetarfile module or is somehow invalid.

exception tarfile.CompressionError¶

Is raised when a compression method is not supported or when the data cannot be decoded properly.

exception tarfile.StreamError¶

Is raised for the limitations that are typical for stream-like TarFileobjects.

Is raised for non-fatal errors when using TarFile.extract(), but only ifTarFile.errorlevel== 2.

Is raised by TarInfo.frombuf() if the buffer it gets is invalid.

exception tarfile.FilterError¶

Base class for members refused by filters.

tarinfo¶

Information about the member that the filter refused to extract, as TarInfo.

exception tarfile.AbsolutePathError¶

Raised to refuse extracting a member with an absolute path.

exception tarfile.OutsideDestinationError¶

Raised to refuse extracting a member outside the destination directory.

exception tarfile.SpecialFileError¶

Raised to refuse extracting a special file (e.g. a device or pipe).

exception tarfile.AbsoluteLinkError¶

Raised to refuse extracting a symbolic link with an absolute path.

exception tarfile.LinkOutsideDestinationError¶

Raised to refuse extracting a symbolic link pointing outside the destination directory.

The following constants are available at the module level:

tarfile.ENCODING¶

The default character encoding: 'utf-8' on Windows, the value returned bysys.getfilesystemencoding() otherwise.

tarfile.REGTYPE¶

tarfile.AREGTYPE¶

A regular file type.

tarfile.LNKTYPE¶

A link (inside tarfile) type.

tarfile.SYMTYPE¶

A symbolic link type.

tarfile.CHRTYPE¶

A character special device type.

tarfile.BLKTYPE¶

A block special device type.

tarfile.DIRTYPE¶

A directory type.

tarfile.FIFOTYPE¶

A FIFO special device type.

tarfile.CONTTYPE¶

A contiguous file type.

tarfile.GNUTYPE_LONGNAME¶

A GNU tar longname type.

tarfile.GNUTYPE_LONGLINK¶

A GNU tar longlink type.

tarfile.GNUTYPE_SPARSE¶

A GNU tar sparse file type.

Each of the following constants defines a tar archive format that thetarfile module is able to create. See section Supported tar formats for details.

tarfile.USTAR_FORMAT¶

POSIX.1-1988 (ustar) format.

tarfile.GNU_FORMAT¶

GNU tar format.

tarfile.PAX_FORMAT¶

POSIX.1-2001 (pax) format.

tarfile.DEFAULT_FORMAT¶

The default format for creating archives. This is currently PAX_FORMAT.

Changed in version 3.8: The default format for new archives was changed toPAX_FORMAT from GNU_FORMAT.

TarFile Objects¶

The TarFile object provides an interface to a tar archive. A tar archive is a sequence of blocks. An archive member (a stored file) is made up of a header block followed by data blocks. It is possible to store a file in a tar archive several times. Each archive member is represented by a TarInfoobject, see TarInfo Objects for details.

A TarFile object can be used as a context manager in a withstatement. It will automatically be closed when the block is completed. Please note that in the event of an exception an archive opened for writing will not be finalized; only the internally used file object will be closed. See theExamples section for a use case.

Added in version 3.2: Added support for the context management protocol.

class tarfile.TarFile(name=None, mode='r', fileobj=None, format=DEFAULT_FORMAT, tarinfo=TarInfo, dereference=False, ignore_zeros=False, encoding=ENCODING, errors='surrogateescape', pax_headers=None, debug=0, errorlevel=1, stream=False)¶

All following arguments are optional and can be accessed as instance attributes as well.

name is the pathname of the archive. name may be a path-like object. It can be omitted if fileobj is given. In this case, the file object’s name attribute is used if it exists.

mode is either 'r' to read from an existing archive, 'a' to append data to an existing file, 'w' to create a new file overwriting an existing one, or 'x' to create a new file only if it does not already exist.

If fileobj is given, it is used for reading or writing data. If it can be determined, mode is overridden by _fileobj_’s mode. fileobj will be used from position 0.

Note

fileobj is not closed, when TarFile is closed.

format controls the archive format for writing. It must be one of the constantsUSTAR_FORMAT, GNU_FORMAT or PAX_FORMAT that are defined at module level. When reading, format will be automatically detected, even if different formats are present in a single archive.

The tarinfo argument can be used to replace the default TarInfo class with a different one.

If dereference is False, add symbolic and hard links to the archive. If it is True, add the content of the target files to the archive. This has no effect on systems that do not support symbolic links.

If ignore_zeros is False, treat an empty block as the end of the archive. If it is True, skip empty (and invalid) blocks and try to get as many members as possible. This is only useful for reading concatenated or damaged archives.

debug can be set from 0 (no debug messages) up to 3 (all debug messages). The messages are written to sys.stderr.

errorlevel controls how extraction errors are handled, see the corresponding attribute.

The encoding and errors arguments define the character encoding to be used for reading or writing the archive and how conversion errors are going to be handled. The default settings will work for most users. See section Unicode issues for in-depth information.

The pax_headers argument is an optional dictionary of strings which will be added as a pax global header if format is PAX_FORMAT.

If stream is set to True then while reading the archive info about files in the archive are not cached, saving memory.

Changed in version 3.2: Use 'surrogateescape' as the default for the errors argument.

Changed in version 3.5: The 'x' (exclusive creation) mode was added.

Changed in version 3.6: The name parameter accepts a path-like object.

Changed in version 3.13: Add the stream parameter.

classmethod TarFile.open(...)¶

Alternative constructor. The tarfile.open() function is actually a shortcut to this classmethod.

TarFile.getmember(name)¶

Return a TarInfo object for member name. If name can not be found in the archive, KeyError is raised.

Note

If a member occurs more than once in the archive, its last occurrence is assumed to be the most up-to-date version.

TarFile.getmembers()¶

Return the members of the archive as a list of TarInfo objects. The list has the same order as the members in the archive.

TarFile.getnames()¶

Return the members as a list of their names. It has the same order as the list returned by getmembers().

TarFile.list(verbose=True, *, members=None)¶

Print a table of contents to sys.stdout. If verbose is False, only the names of the members are printed. If it is True, output similar to that of ls -l is produced. If optional members is given, it must be a subset of the list returned by getmembers().

Changed in version 3.5: Added the members parameter.

TarFile.next()¶

Return the next member of the archive as a TarInfo object, whenTarFile is opened for reading. Return None if there is no more available.

Extract all members from the archive to the current working directory or directory path. If optional members is given, it must be a subset of the list returned by getmembers(). Directory information like owner, modification time and permissions are set after all members have been extracted. This is done to work around two problems: A directory’s modification time is reset each time a file is created in it. And, if a directory’s permissions do not allow writing, extracting files to it will fail.

If numeric_owner is True, the uid and gid numbers from the tarfile are used to set the owner/group for the extracted files. Otherwise, the named values from the tarfile are used.

The filter argument specifies how members are modified or rejected before extraction. See Extraction filters for details. It is recommended to set this explicitly only if specific tar features are required, or as filter='data' to support Python versions with a less secure default (3.13 and lower).

Warning

Never extract archives from untrusted sources without prior inspection.

Since Python 3.14, the default (data) will prevent the most dangerous security issues. However, it will not prevent all unintended or insecure behavior. Read the Extraction filters section for details.

Changed in version 3.5: Added the numeric_owner parameter.

Changed in version 3.6: The path parameter accepts a path-like object.

Changed in version 3.12: Added the filter parameter.

Changed in version 3.14: The filter parameter now defaults to 'data'.

Extract a member from the archive to the current working directory, using its full name. Its file information is extracted as accurately as possible. _member_may be a filename or a TarInfo object. You can specify a different directory using path. path may be a path-like object. File attributes (owner, mtime, mode) are set unless set_attrs is false.

The numeric_owner and filter arguments are the same as for extractall().

Note

The extract() method does not take care of several extraction issues. In most cases you should consider using the extractall() method.

Warning

Never extract archives from untrusted sources without prior inspection. See the warning for extractall() for details.

Changed in version 3.2: Added the set_attrs parameter.

Changed in version 3.5: Added the numeric_owner parameter.

Changed in version 3.6: The path parameter accepts a path-like object.

Changed in version 3.12: Added the filter parameter.

Extract a member from the archive as a file object. member may be a filename or a TarInfo object. If member is a regular file or a link, an io.BufferedReader object is returned. For all other existing members, None is returned. If member does not appear in the archive, KeyError is raised.

Changed in version 3.13: The returned io.BufferedReader object has the modeattribute which is always equal to 'rb'.

TarFile.errorlevel_: int_¶

If errorlevel is 0, errors are ignored when using TarFile.extract()and TarFile.extractall(). Nevertheless, they appear as error messages in the debug output when_debug_ is greater than 0. If 1 (the default), all fatal errors are raised as OSError orFilterError exceptions. If 2, all non-fatal errors are raised as TarError exceptions as well.

Some exceptions, e.g. ones caused by wrong argument types or data corruption, are always raised.

Custom extraction filtersshould raise FilterError for fatal errors and ExtractError for non-fatal ones.

Note that when an exception is raised, the archive may be partially extracted. It is the user’s responsibility to clean up.

Added in version 3.12.

The extraction filter used as a default for the filter argument of extract()and extractall().

The attribute may be None or a callable. String names are not allowed for this attribute, unlike the _filter_argument to extract().

If extraction_filter is None (the default), extraction methods will use the data filter by default.

The attribute may be set on instances or overridden in subclasses. It also is possible to set it on the TarFile class itself to set a global default, although, since it affects all uses of tarfile, it is best practice to only do so in top-level applications orsite configuration. To set a global default this way, a filter function needs to be wrapped instaticmethod() to prevent injection of a self argument.

Changed in version 3.14: The default filter is set to data, which disallows some dangerous features such as links to absolute paths or paths outside of the destination. Previously, the default was equivalent tofully_trusted.

TarFile.add(name, arcname=None, recursive=True, *, filter=None)¶

Add the file name to the archive. name may be any type of file (directory, fifo, symbolic link, etc.). If given, arcname specifies an alternative name for the file in the archive. Directories are added recursively by default. This can be avoided by setting recursive toFalse. Recursion adds entries in sorted order. If filter is given, it should be a function that takes a TarInfo object argument and returns the changed TarInfo object. If it instead returnsNone the TarInfo object will be excluded from the archive. See Examples for an example.

Changed in version 3.2: Added the filter parameter.

Changed in version 3.7: Recursion adds entries in sorted order.

TarFile.addfile(tarinfo, fileobj=None)¶

Add the TarInfo object tarinfo to the archive. If tarinfo represents a non zero-size regular file, the fileobj argument should be a binary file, and tarinfo.size bytes are read from it and added to the archive. You can create TarInfo objects directly, or by using gettarinfo().

Changed in version 3.13: fileobj must be given for non-zero-sized regular files.

TarFile.gettarinfo(name=None, arcname=None, fileobj=None)¶

Create a TarInfo object from the result of os.stat() or equivalent on an existing file. The file is either named by name, or specified as a file object fileobj with a file descriptor.name may be a path-like object. If given, arcname specifies an alternative name for the file in the archive, otherwise, the name is taken from _fileobj_’sname attribute, or the name argument. The name should be a text string.

You can modify some of the TarInfo’s attributes before you add it using addfile(). If the file object is not an ordinary file object positioned at the beginning of the file, attributes such as size may need modifying. This is the case for objects such as GzipFile. The name may also be modified, in which case _arcname_could be a dummy string.

Changed in version 3.6: The name parameter accepts a path-like object.

TarFile.close()¶

Close the TarFile. In write mode, two finishing zero blocks are appended to the archive.

A dictionary containing key-value pairs of pax global headers.

TarInfo Objects¶

A TarInfo object represents one member in a TarFile. Aside from storing all required attributes of a file (like file type, size, time, permissions, owner etc.), it provides some useful methods to determine its type. It does not contain the file’s data itself.

TarInfo objects are returned by TarFile’s methodsgetmember(), getmembers() andgettarinfo().

Modifying the objects returned by getmember() orgetmembers() will affect all subsequent operations on the archive. For cases where this is unwanted, you can use copy.copy() or call the replace() method to create a modified copy in one step.

Several attributes can be set to None to indicate that a piece of metadata is unused or unknown. Different TarInfo methods handle None differently:

• The extract() or extractall() methods will ignore the corresponding metadata, leaving it set to a default.
• addfile() will fail.
• list() will print a placeholder string.

class tarfile.TarInfo(name='')¶

Create a TarInfo object.

classmethod TarInfo.frombuf(buf, encoding, errors)¶

Create and return a TarInfo object from string buffer buf.

Raises HeaderError if the buffer is invalid.

classmethod TarInfo.fromtarfile(tarfile)¶

Read the next member from the TarFile object tarfile and return it as a TarInfo object.

TarInfo.tobuf(format=DEFAULT_FORMAT, encoding=ENCODING, errors='surrogateescape')¶

Create a string buffer from a TarInfo object. For information on the arguments see the constructor of the TarFile class.

Changed in version 3.2: Use 'surrogateescape' as the default for the errors argument.

A TarInfo object has the following public data attributes:

TarInfo.name_: str_¶

Name of the archive member.

TarInfo.size_: int_¶

Size in bytes.

TarInfo.mtime_: int | float_¶

Time of last modification in seconds since the epoch, as in os.stat_result.st_mtime.

Changed in version 3.12: Can be set to None for extract() andextractall(), causing extraction to skip applying this attribute.

TarInfo.mode_: int_¶

Permission bits, as for os.chmod().

Changed in version 3.12: Can be set to None for extract() andextractall(), causing extraction to skip applying this attribute.

TarInfo.type¶

File type. type is usually one of these constants: REGTYPE,AREGTYPE, LNKTYPE, SYMTYPE, DIRTYPE,FIFOTYPE, CONTTYPE, CHRTYPE, BLKTYPE,GNUTYPE_SPARSE. To determine the type of a TarInfo object more conveniently, use the is*() methods below.

TarInfo.linkname_: str_¶

Name of the target file name, which is only present in TarInfo objects of type LNKTYPE and SYMTYPE.

For symbolic links (SYMTYPE), the linkname is relative to the directory that contains the link. For hard links (LNKTYPE), the linkname is relative to the root of the archive.

TarInfo.uid_: int_¶

User ID of the user who originally stored this member.

Changed in version 3.12: Can be set to None for extract() andextractall(), causing extraction to skip applying this attribute.

TarInfo.gid_: int_¶

Group ID of the user who originally stored this member.

Changed in version 3.12: Can be set to None for extract() andextractall(), causing extraction to skip applying this attribute.

TarInfo.uname_: str_¶

User name.

Changed in version 3.12: Can be set to None for extract() andextractall(), causing extraction to skip applying this attribute.

TarInfo.gname_: str_¶

Group name.

Changed in version 3.12: Can be set to None for extract() andextractall(), causing extraction to skip applying this attribute.

TarInfo.chksum_: int_¶

Header checksum.

TarInfo.devmajor_: int_¶

Device major number.

TarInfo.devminor_: int_¶

Device minor number.

TarInfo.offset_: int_¶

The tar header starts here.

TarInfo.offset_data_: int_¶

The file’s data starts here.

TarInfo.sparse¶

Sparse member information.

A dictionary containing key-value pairs of an associated pax extended header.

TarInfo.replace(name=..., mtime=..., mode=..., linkname=..., uid=..., gid=..., uname=..., gname=..., deep=True)¶

Added in version 3.12.

Return a new copy of the TarInfo object with the given attributes changed. For example, to return a TarInfo with the group name set to'staff', use:

new_tarinfo = old_tarinfo.replace(gname='staff')

By default, a deep copy is made. If deep is false, the copy is shallow, i.e. pax_headersand any custom attributes are shared with the original TarInfo object.

A TarInfo object also provides some convenient query methods:

TarInfo.isfile()¶

Return True if the TarInfo object is a regular file.

TarInfo.isreg()¶

Same as isfile().

TarInfo.isdir()¶

Return True if it is a directory.

TarInfo.issym()¶

Return True if it is a symbolic link.

TarInfo.islnk()¶

Return True if it is a hard link.

TarInfo.ischr()¶

Return True if it is a character device.

TarInfo.isblk()¶

Return True if it is a block device.

TarInfo.isfifo()¶

Return True if it is a FIFO.

TarInfo.isdev()¶

Return True if it is one of character device, block device or FIFO.

Command-Line Interface¶

Added in version 3.4.

The tarfile module provides a simple command-line interface to interact with tar archives.

If you want to create a new tar archive, specify its name after the -coption and then list the filename(s) that should be included:

$ python -m tarfile -c monty.tar spam.txt eggs.txt

Passing a directory is also acceptable:

$ python -m tarfile -c monty.tar life-of-brian_1979/

If you want to extract a tar archive into the current directory, use the -e option:

$ python -m tarfile -e monty.tar

You can also extract a tar archive into a different directory by passing the directory’s name:

$ python -m tarfile -e monty.tar other-dir/

For a list of the files in a tar archive, use the -l option:

$ python -m tarfile -l monty.tar

Command-line options¶

-l ¶

--list ¶

List files in a tarfile.

-c ... ¶

--create ... ¶

Create tarfile from source files.

-e [<output_dir>]¶

Extract tarfile into the current directory if output_dir is not specified.

-t ¶

--test ¶

Test whether the tarfile is valid or not.

-v, --verbose¶

Verbose output.

--filter ¶

Specifies the filter for --extract. See Extraction filters for details. Only string names are accepted (that is, fully_trusted, tar, and data).

Examples¶

How to extract an entire tar archive to the current working directory:

import tarfile tar = tarfile.open("sample.tar.gz") tar.extractall(filter='data') tar.close()

How to extract a subset of a tar archive with TarFile.extractall() using a generator function instead of a list:

import os import tarfile

def py_files(members): for tarinfo in members: if os.path.splitext(tarinfo.name)[1] == ".py": yield tarinfo

tar = tarfile.open("sample.tar.gz") tar.extractall(members=py_files(tar)) tar.close()

How to create an uncompressed tar archive from a list of filenames:

import tarfile tar = tarfile.open("sample.tar", "w") for name in ["foo", "bar", "quux"]: tar.add(name) tar.close()

The same example using the with statement:

import tarfile with tarfile.open("sample.tar", "w") as tar: for name in ["foo", "bar", "quux"]: tar.add(name)

How to read a gzip compressed tar archive and display some member information:

import tarfile tar = tarfile.open("sample.tar.gz", "r:gz") for tarinfo in tar: print(tarinfo.name, "is", tarinfo.size, "bytes in size and is ", end="") if tarinfo.isreg(): print("a regular file.") elif tarinfo.isdir(): print("a directory.") else: print("something else.") tar.close()

How to create an archive and reset the user information using the _filter_parameter in TarFile.add():

import tarfile def reset(tarinfo): tarinfo.uid = tarinfo.gid = 0 tarinfo.uname = tarinfo.gname = "root" return tarinfo tar = tarfile.open("sample.tar.gz", "w:gz") tar.add("foo", filter=reset) tar.close()

Supported tar formats¶

There are three tar formats that can be created with the tarfile module:

• The POSIX.1-1988 ustar format (USTAR_FORMAT). It supports filenames up to a length of at best 256 characters and linknames up to 100 characters. The maximum file size is 8 GiB. This is an old and limited but widely supported format.
• The GNU tar format (GNU_FORMAT). It supports long filenames and linknames, files bigger than 8 GiB and sparse files. It is the de facto standard on GNU/Linux systems. tarfile fully supports the GNU tar extensions for long names, sparse file support is read-only.
• The POSIX.1-2001 pax format (PAX_FORMAT). It is the most flexible format with virtually no limits. It supports long filenames and linknames, large files and stores pathnames in a portable way. Modern tar implementations, including GNU tar, bsdtar/libarchive and star, fully support extended pax_features; some old or unmaintained libraries may not, but should treat_pax archives as if they were in the universally supported ustar format. It is the current default format for new archives.
  It extends the existing ustar format with extra headers for information that cannot be stored otherwise. There are two flavours of pax headers: Extended headers only affect the subsequent file header, global headers are valid for the complete archive and affect all following files. All the data in a pax header is encoded in UTF-8 for portability reasons.

There are some more variants of the tar format which can be read, but not created:

• The ancient V7 format. This is the first tar format from Unix Seventh Edition, storing only regular files and directories. Names must not be longer than 100 characters, there is no user/group name information. Some archives have miscalculated header checksums in case of fields with non-ASCII characters.
• The SunOS tar extended format. This format is a variant of the POSIX.1-2001 pax format, but is not compatible.

Unicode issues¶

The tar format was originally conceived to make backups on tape drives with the main focus on preserving file system information. Nowadays tar archives are commonly used for file distribution and exchanging archives over networks. One problem of the original format (which is the basis of all other formats) is that there is no concept of supporting different character encodings. For example, an ordinary tar archive created on a UTF-8 system cannot be read correctly on a Latin-1 system if it contains non-ASCII characters. Textual metadata (like filenames, linknames, user/group names) will appear damaged. Unfortunately, there is no way to autodetect the encoding of an archive. The pax format was designed to solve this problem. It stores non-ASCII metadata using the universal character encoding UTF-8.

The details of character conversion in tarfile are controlled by the_encoding_ and errors keyword arguments of the TarFile class.

encoding defines the character encoding to use for the metadata in the archive. The default value is sys.getfilesystemencoding() or 'ascii'as a fallback. Depending on whether the archive is read or written, the metadata must be either decoded or encoded. If encoding is not set appropriately, this conversion may fail.

The errors argument defines how characters are treated that cannot be converted. Possible values are listed in section Error Handlers. The default scheme is 'surrogateescape' which Python also uses for its file system calls, see File Names, Command Line Arguments, and Environment Variables.

For PAX_FORMAT archives (the default), encoding is generally not needed because all the metadata is stored using UTF-8. encoding is only used in the rare cases when binary pax headers are decoded or when strings with surrogate characters are stored.