Extracting bzip2 & gzip files

[Jaco Greeff]

Hi,

I have a function to read compressed and uncompressed files into a string.
Unfortionately, I need some help in getting the thing to actually work. As
you can see from the function below, I'm using system calls to read the file
into a string and then return it, but am receivcing errors from the actual
bzip2 execution:

"It is possible that the compressed file(s) have become corrupted.
You can use the -tvv option to test integrity of such files.

You can use the `bzip2recover' program to *attempt* to recover
data from undamaged sections of corrupted files."

I'm stumped. If I could get it to work for bzip2 only, I'll
be happy - I have looked at the pybz2 0.02 module, but it seems to not want
to compile on my system, hence my "workaround":

def readFile(file, comp='None'):
	if   comp == 'bz2': 
		r, s = commands.getstatusoutput(string.join(['bzcat', file], ' '))
	elif comp == 'gz': 
		r, s = commands.getstatusoutput(string.join(['gunzip -c', file], ' '))
	else: 
		r, s = commands.getstatusoutput(string.join(['cat', file], ' '))
	r == 1:
		print 'Error:', s
		s = ''
	return s

Any ideas? Help on this?

Thanks and greetings,
Jaco