If I have the contents of a zipfile in a Python string, can I decompress it without writing it to a file?

Question

I’ve written some Python code that fetches a zip file from the web and into a string:

In [1]: zip_contents[0:5]
Out[1]: 'PKx03x04x14'

I see there’s a zipfile library, but I’m having trouble finding a function in it that I can just pass a bunch of raw zip data. It seems to want to read it from a file.

Do I really need to dump this to a temp file, or is there a way around it?

Asked By: mike

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Source

Answer 1

Wrap your string in a cStringIO object. It looks, acts, and quacks like a file object, but resides in memory.

Answered By: Eevee

Answer 2

zipfile.ZipFile accepts any file-like object:

class zipfile.ZipFile(file, …)

Open a ZIP file, where file can be a path to a file (a string), a file-like object or a path-like object.

So you can use BytesIO (3.x) or StringIO (2.x):

# Modern Python 3.x
from io import BytesIO
import zipfile

fp = BytesIO(b'PKx03x04x14')
zfp = zipfile.ZipFile(fp, "r")

# Legacy Python 2.x
try:
    from cStringIO import StringIO
except:
    from StringIO import StringIO
import zipfile

fp = StringIO('PKx03x04x14')
zfp = zipfile.ZipFile(fp, "r")

Answered By: John Millikin

Answer 3

This question is old, python changed a little bit since the accepted answer.

The cStringIO lib changed name since python 3.0 (more details in https://stackoverflow.com/a/18284900/8647541)

Just try the following :

import io
import zipfile

fp = io.StringIO('PKx03x04x14') # or io.BytesIO if you have a Bytes object
zfp = zipfile.ZipFile(fp, "r")
zfp.extractall("./extract_folder") # extract zip in a `extract_folder` folder

Answered By: Jorane

If I have the contents of a zipfile in a Python string, can I decompress it without writing it to a file?

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