I Love Python: ZipFile Edition

Michael Schurter — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:42:49 +0000

For a client web project I needed to create a zip file containing a number of generated XML files. This isn’t something I need to do very often, so I briefly considered just writing the XML files to disk and running a zip command. Ugly, but surely trying to dig up a pleasant Python zip library would be more work?

Turns out Python has had a wonderful zip library in its standard library since 1.6! The zipfile module makes creating zip files a breeze:

import os
from zipfile import ZipFile, ZIP_DEFLATED
 
from django.template.defaultfilters import slugify
 
from somewhere_else import render_spam_xml, render_egg_xml
 
ZIP_PATH = "/some/system/path/for/zips"
 
def create_zip(spam):
    spam_slug = slugify(spam.name)
    filename = "%s.zip" % spam_slug
    abspath = os.path.join(ZIP_PATH, filename)
 
    # Create zip
    z = ZipFile(abspath, "w", ZIP_DEFLATED)
 
    # Write spam xml directly to zip
    z.writestr("%s.xml" % spam_slug, render_spam_xml(spam))
 
    # Write xml files to zip
    for egg in spam.egg_set.all():
        egg_slug = slugify(egg.name)
 
        # Renders the egg object to an xml string
        xml = render_egg_xml(egg)
 
        # Note how easy it is to specify paths in the zip file:
        z.writestr("eggs/%s.xml" % egg_slug, xml)
 
    # Zip file must be closed to be valid
    z.close()
    return abspath

(Sorry for the Django bits in there, but they should be easy to replace.)

My favorite part is that you can use either the ZipFile.write method to add files to the zip or the ZipFile.writestr method to write bytes (strings in my case) directly to the zip file.

At any rate, just wanted to blog about it, so when I need to do it again in a few years I don’t do something stupid like running the zip command.

schmichael's blog » zip

I Love Python: ZipFile Edition