Home Original page

gzip module - help!

Fredrik Lundh fredrik at pythonware.com
Sun Dec 14 04:31:50 EST 2003 
"bmgz" <bmgz at dev.null> wrote:

> I am having problems trying to use the gzip module, I do the followig
>
> >>>import gzip
> >>>file = gzip.GzipFile("testfile.txt")

this attempts to open a compressed file named "testfile.txt".  is
this what you want?

> >>>file.write() -which params does this accept?, archive name?

the data you want to store in the file.  GzipFile returns a file object,
just like an ordinary open.

> I get this ERROR:
>
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
>   File "/usr/lib/python2.2/gzip.py", line 139, in write
>     self.size = self.size + len(data)
> AttributeError: GzipFile instance has no attribute 'size'

on my machine, that call gives this error:

>>> f.write()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
TypeError: write() takes exactly 2 arguments (1 given)

> But if I include a mode in "gzip.GzipFile("testfile.txt", 'wb')" or
> something like that I don't get an error
> and then I manage to do >>>file.close() but still I can't find any
> compressed file?

on my machine, that creates a compressed file named "testfile.txt",
which unzips to nothing.

maybe this is what you want:

    import gzip, shutil
    infile = open("testfile.txt") # text file to compress
    outfile = gzip.GzipFile("testfile.txt.gz", "wb") # archive file
    shutil.copyfileobj(infile, outfile)
    outfile.close()

to compress a binary file, make sure you pass "rb" as the second
argument to the first open:

    infile = open("testfile.dat", "rb") # binary file to compress

 (for details, read the gzip and shutil chapters in the library reference)

</F>
More information about the Python-list mailing list