How do I read text files within a zip file?

Question

So say I have a zip file named "files.zip" it contains "text1.txt":

words

and "text2.txt":

other words

How do I tell python to open and read the text1.txt file? I know that usually to open a text file outside of a zip file I would just do this:

file = open('text1.txt','r')

Answer 1

If you need to open a file inside a ZIP archive in text mode, e.g. to pass it to csv.reader, you can do so with io.TextIOWrapper:

import io
import zipfile

with zipfile.ZipFile("files.zip") as zf:
    with io.TextIOWrapper(zf.open("text1.txt"), encoding="utf-8") as f:
        ...

Answer 2

You can use the zipfile module like so:

zip = zipfile.ZipFile('test.zip')
file = zip.read('text1.txt')

Don't forget to import zipfile module: import zipfile