tarfile doesn't work with tgz files?

[Robert Dailey]

On May 16, 11:49 am, Gary Herron <gher... at islandtraining.com> wrote:
> Robert Dailey wrote:
> > Hi,
>
> > I'm not a big expert on the tarfile component, but I assumed that .tgz
> > files were short for .tar.gz and the format was the same.
>
> That's correct.
>
> > When I try
> > to extract a .tgz file using tarfile in Python 3.0 on Windows, I get
> > the following error:
>
> >   File "C:\Python30\lib\tarfile.py", line 1630, in open
> >     raise ReadError("file could not be opened successfully")
> > tarfile.ReadError: file could not be opened successfully
>
> > I'm assuming this is because the .tgz format is not what I think it is
> > and is not supported.
>
> Not true.  It's supported.
>
> >  How can I extract .tgz files using Python 3.0?
> > Note that I probably can't depend on third party python modules, since
> > I have yet to find many that support Python 3.0.
>
> > Thanks.
>
> It's hard to debug your code when you don't show us your code,  so I
> won't try.
>
> I can however supply a bit of working code:
>
>  >>> import tarfile
>  >>> f=tarfile.open('f.tgz')
>  >>> f.list()
> -rw-r--r-- gherron/gherron        703 2009-03-14 15:59:46 t.py
> -rw-r--r-- gherron/gherron        566 2009-05-15 09:13:08 note-bzr-hg
> -rw-r--r-- gherron/gherron      11563 2009-04-24 09:33:12 .emacs
>
> So the module correctly reads the tar-gzip file, and finds its contents.
>
> Now, what is it you were trying to do?
>
> Gary Herron

Okay so I managed to figure out the problem.

Initially, I manually downloaded the TGZ above through Chrome and then
opened it in WinRAR and extracted the files. Everything worked fine.

Then, I ran my Python script which uses urlretrieve() to download the
file and then tarfile is used to extract it. However, urlretrieve()
was not downloading the full file because of a bug that was corrupting
my URL.

Sorry for the confusion, and thanks to everyone for the very prompt
help!