Gzip

Introduction

This module provides a simple interface to compress and decompress files just like the GNU programs gzip and gunzip would.

The data compression is provided by the zlib module.

The gzip module provides the GzipFile class which is modeled after Python’s File Object. The GzipFile class reads and writes gzip-format files, automatically compressing or decompressing the data so that it looks like an ordinary file object.

Read and write GNU zip files

import gzip
import os

outfilename = 'example.txt.gz'
output = gzip.open(outfilename, 'wb')
try:
    output.write('Contents of the example file go here.\n')
finally:
    output.close()

print outfilename, 'contains', os.stat(outfilename).st_size, 'bytes of compressed data'
os.system('file -b --mime %s' % outfilename)

Save it as 1gzip_write.py1.Run it through terminal.

$ python gzip_write.py

application/x-gzip; charset=binary
example.txt.gz contains 68 bytes of compressed data