How to process zip file with Python

Question

a.zip---
      -- b.txt
      -- c.txt
      -- d.txt

Methods to process the zip files with Python,

I could expand the zip file to a temporary directory, then process each txt file one bye one

Here, I am more interested to know whether or not python provides such a way so that I don't have to manually expand the zip file and just simply treat the zip file as a specialized folder and process each txt accordingly.

All of these are duplicates: http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=python+zipfile — S.Lott, Sep 23 '11 at 19:22
possible duplicate of [How do I read selected files from a remote Zip archive over HTTP using Python?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/94490/how-do-i-read-selected-files-from-a-remote-zip-archive-over-http-using-python) — S.Lott, Sep 23 '11 at 19:24
Or maybe a duplicate of this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4890860/make-in-memory-copy-of-a-zip-by-iterrating-over-each-file-of-the-input — S.Lott, Sep 23 '11 at 19:25

score 29 · Accepted Answer · edited Jul 30 '21 at 07:00

The Python standard library helps you.

Doug Hellman writes very informative posts about selected modules: https://pymotw.com/3/zipfile/

To comment on Davids post: From Python 2.7 on the Zipfile object provides a context manager, so the recommended way would be:

import zipfile
with zipfile.ZipFile("zipfile.zip", "r") as f:
    for name in f.namelist():
        data = f.read(name)
        print name, len(data), repr(data[:10])

The close method will be called automatically because of the with statement. This is especially important if you write to the file.

score 7 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 23 '11 at 19:14

Yes you can process each file by itself. Take a look at the tutorial here. For your needs you can do something like this example from that tutorial:

import zipfile
file = zipfile.ZipFile("zipfile.zip", "r")
for name in file.namelist():
    data = file.read(name)
    print name, len(data), repr(data[:10])

This will iterate over each file in the archive and print out its name, length and the first 10 bytes.

The comprehensive reference documentation is here.

using file as a variable name conflicts with the builtin file type. — rocksportrocker, Sep 23 '11 at 19:20

How to process zip file with Python

2 Answers2

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