Introduction

compfile Common interfaces for manipulating compressed files (lzma, gzip etc)

Build Status Documentation Status Coverage Status

Rationale

Sometimes, we need to deal with different compressed files. There are several packages/modules for compressed file manipulation, e.g., gzip module for “.gz” files, *lzma module for “.lzma” and “.xz” files, etc. If we want to support different types of compressed file in our project, probably we need to do the following:

if fnmatch.fnmatch(fname, "*.gz"):
    f = gzip.open(fname, 'rb')
    # do something with f
elif fnmatch.fnmatch(fname, "*.bz2'):
    f = bz2.open(fname, 'rb')
    # do something with f
else:
    # other stuffs

The problems of the above approch are:

  • We need to repeat the compression type inference logic everywhere we want to support different compression types.
  • Different compression type manipulation modules may have different API convention.

compfile is designed to solve the above problems. It abstracts the logic of compressed file manipulations and provides a single high level interface for users.

Installation

Install from PyPI

pip install compfile

Install from Anaconda

conda install -c liyugong compfile

Install from GitHub

pip install git+https://github.com/gongliyu/compfile.git@master

Simple example

Using compfile is pretty simple. Just construct a compfile.CompFile object or call compfile.open

with compfile.open(fname, 'r') as f:
    # do something with f

The object returned is a file object, so we can do ordinary file processing with it.

License

The compfile package is released under the MIT License