problems with tarfile.open and tar.bz2

[justin.vanwinkle at gmail.com]

Hello everyone,

I need some tar functionality for my program.  Currently the following
code properly displays tar archives, and tar.gz archives.  However, it
chokes on tar.bz2 archives with the following error:

  File "mail_filter.py", line 262, in extract_archive
    tar_archive = tarfile.open('', 'r', fileobj)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.3/tarfile.py", line 900, in open
    return func(name, "r", fileobj)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.3/tarfile.py", line 980, in bz2open
    raise ValueError, "no support for external file objects"
ValueError: no support for external file objects


The code snippet is:

    fileobj = StringIO(attach)

    if attach_type == 'application/x-tgz' or attach_type ==
'application/x-tbz' or attach_type == 'application/x-tar':
        print '%s file detected, attempting to decompress' %
(attach_type)

        tar_archive = tarfile.open('', 'r', fileobj)

        print tar_archive.getnames()
        for archive_file in tar_archive.getmembers():
            print archive_file
            print tar_archive.extractfile(archive_file).read()
        #except:
        #    print 'Error while extracting %s.' % (attach_type)
        #    return ''

I'm at my wits end with this error, it doesn't make any sense that it
would treat bzip2'd tar archives very differently than gz'd tar
archives.

Justin