How to process zip file with Python

Question

a.zip---
      -- b.txt
      -- c.txt
      -- d.txt

Methods to process the zip files with Python,

I could expand the zip file to a temporary directory, then process each txt file one bye one

Here, I am more interested to know whether or not python provides such a way so that I don't have to manually expand the zip file and just simply treat the zip file as a specialized folder and process each txt accordingly.

Answer 1

The Python standard library helps you.

Doug Hellman writes very informative posts about selected modules: https://pymotw.com/3/zipfile/

To comment on Davids post: From Python 2.7 on the Zipfile object provides a context manager, so the recommended way would be:

import zipfile
with zipfile.ZipFile("zipfile.zip", "r") as f:
    for name in f.namelist():
        data = f.read(name)
        print name, len(data), repr(data[:10])

The close method will be called automatically because of the with statement. This is especially important if you write to the file.

Answer 2

Yes you can process each file by itself. Take a look at the tutorial here. For your needs you can do something like this example from that tutorial:

import zipfile
file = zipfile.ZipFile("zipfile.zip", "r")
for name in file.namelist():
    data = file.read(name)
    print name, len(data), repr(data[:10])

This will iterate over each file in the archive and print out its name, length and the first 10 bytes.

The comprehensive reference documentation is here.