Compressed Files
Although storage space and transmission bandwidth are increasingly cheap and abundant, in many cases you can save such resources, at the expense of some computational effort, by using compression. Since computational power grows cheaper and more abundant even faster than other resources, such as bandwidth, compression’s popularity keeps growing. Python makes it easy for your programs to support compression by supplying dedicated modules for compression as part of every Python distribution.
The gzip Module
The gzip
module lets
you read and write files compatible with those handled by the
powerful GNU compression programs gzip
and
gunzip
. The GNU programs support several
compression formats, but module gzip
supports only
the highly effective native gzip
format,
normally denoted by appending the extension .gz
to a filename. Module gzip
supplies the
GzipFile
class and an open
factory function.
The zipfile Module
The zipfile
module
lets you read and write ZIP files (i.e., archive files compatible
with those handled by popular compression programs
zip
and unzip
,
pkzip
and pkunzip
,
WinZip
, and so on). Detailed information on the
formats and capabilities of ZIP files can be found at http://www.pkware.com/appnote.html and
http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/. You
need to study this detailed information in order to perform advanced
ZIP file handing with module
zipfile
.
Module zipfile
can’t handle ZIP
files with appended comments, multidisk ZIP files, or
.zip
archive ...
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