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bz2 module

Alex Martelli aleaxit at yahoo.com
Mon Oct 18 16:40:07 EDT 2004 
Brad Tilley <bradtilley at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm having a bit of trouble using the bz2 module. The documentation for
> it is very poor. Here's what I'm trying to do:
> 
> import bz2
> 
> x = file('test.bkf', 'rb')
> 
> while True:
>          data = x.read(1024000)
>          if not data:
>                  break
>          bz2.BZ2File('test.bkf.copy', 'w').write(data)
> 
> x.close()
> 
> It fails with this error:
> AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'BZ2File'

Looks like your Python is misinstalled, or something...:

>>> import bz2
>>> bz2.BZ2File
<type 'bz2.BZ2File'>
>>> 

> Can anyone give me an example of how to use bz2 to compress files. Why

import bz2
source = open('test.bkf', 'rb')
destination = bz2.BZ2File('test.bkf.bz2', 'w')

while True:
    data = source.read(1024000)
    if not data: break
    destination.write(data)

destination.close()
source.close()

> don't the docs give examples of this?!?

If the docs were perfect, who'd ever buy Python in a Nutshell, or the
Python Cookbook?  So I sneak in at night in the CVS repository and
secretly sabotage them just enough, destroying, without leaving a trace,
all the wonderful doc patches that people are submitting all the time,
fixing problems rather than whining about them...


Alex
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