The zipfile module

(New in 2.0) This module allows you to read and write files in the popular ZIP archive format.

Listing the contents

To list the contents of an existing archive, you can use the namelist and infolist methods. The former returns a list of filenames, the latter a list of ZipInfo instances.

# File: zipfile-example-1.py

import zipfile

file = zipfile.ZipFile("samples/sample.zip", "r")

# list filenames
for name in file.namelist():
    print name,
print

# list file information
for info in file.infolist():
    print info.filename, info.date_time, info.file_size

$ python zipfile-example-1.py
sample.txt sample.jpg
sample.txt (1999, 9, 11, 20, 11, 8) 302
sample.jpg (1999, 9, 18, 16, 9, 44) 4762

Reading data from a ZIP file

To read data from an archive, simply use the read method. It takes a filename as an argument, and returns the data as a string.

# File: zipfile-example-2.py

import zipfile

file = zipfile.ZipFile("samples/sample.zip", "r")

for name in file.namelist():
    data = file.read(name)
    print name, len(data), repr(data[:10])

$ python zipfile-example-2.py
sample.txt 302 'We will pe'
sample.jpg 4762 '\377\330\377\340\000\020JFIF'

Writing data to a ZIP file

Adding files to an archive is easy. Just pass the file name, and the name you want that file to have in the archive, to the write method.

The following script creates a ZIP file containing all files in the samples directory.

The third, optional argument to the write method controls what compression method to use. Or rather, it controls whether data should be compressed at all. The default is zipfile.ZIP_STORED, which stores the data in the archive without any compression at all. If the zlib module is installed, you can also use zipfile.ZIP_DEFLATED, which gives you “deflate” compression.

The zipfile module also allows you to add strings to the archive. However, adding data from a string is a bit tricky; instead of just passing in the archive name and the data, you have to create a ZipInfo instance and configure it correctly. Here’s a simple example: