How to construct a TarFile object in memory from byte buffer in Python 3?

Question

Is it possible to create a TarFile object in memory using a buffer containing the tar data without having to write the TarFile to disk and open it up again? We get the bytes sent over a socket.

Something like this:

import tarfile byte_array = client.read_bytes() tar = tarfile.open(byte_array) # how to do this? # use "tar" as a regular TarFile object for member in tar.getmembers():     f = tar.extractfile(member)     print(f) 

Note: one of the reasons for doing this is that we eventually want to be able to do this with multiple threads simultaneously, so using a temp file might be overridden if two threads try to do it at the same time.

Thank you for any and all help!

Answer 1

BytesIO() from IO module does exactly what you need.

import tarfile, io byte_array = client.read_bytes() file_like_object = io.BytesIO(byte_array) tar = tarfile.open(fileobj=file_like_object) # use "tar" as a regular TarFile object for member in tar.getmembers():     f = tar.extractfile(member)     print(f)