[Python-Dev] zipfile.py and InfoZIP files

[M.-A. Lemburg]

"James C. Ahlstrom" wrote:
> 
> "M.-A. Lemburg" wrote:
> 
> I am happy to modify zipfile.py as desired by this group.
> 
> > I'm having trouble opening ZIP files created using InfoZIP's
> > zip utility (which uses zlib) with zipfile.py:
> >
> > >>> x = z.read('README')
> > Traceback (innermost last):
> >   File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
> >   File "/home/lemburg/lib/zipfile.py", line 242, in read
> >     bytes = dc.decompress(bytes)
> > zlib.error: Error -3 while decompressing: incomplete dynamic bit lengths tree
> >
> > Is this due to the installed zlib on my system being incompatible,
> > or is this a bug in zipfile.py ? I have libz version 1.1.3 and
> > zip version 2.2.
> 
> I "borrowed" the zlib code from someone else, and it uses
> undocumented features.  Since WinZip seems happy with the compression
> I left it alone.  I wouldn't be surprised if other utilities have
> problems, especially if they use zlib.  I am not sure what to
> do about this.  My starting view is that there is only one
> compression method, and if WinZip accepts it, then InfoZip
> is wrong.  Is there perhaps a version difference in zlib
> in Python vs InfoZip?
> 
> Could you send me an InfoZip zip file?

As it turned out it was a false alarm: Python must have picked
up an old zlibmodule.so from somewhere which caused the
problem. A clean rebuild made zipfile work with my InfoZIP
files (all my Python Pages ZIP-archives are built using InfoZIP 2.2).

Now I get this error after working in interactive Python
mode with zipfile:

Exception exceptions.AttributeError: 
"ZipFile instance has no attribute 'fp'" in <method ZipFile.__del__ of ZipFile instance at 0x824524c> ignored

I guess the __del__ method has to be a bit more careful about
what it expects to find... sometimes the builtins may have
already been garbage collected.

> > Also, I wonder why zipfile forces the mode flag to be 'r',
> > 'w' and 'a' -- wouldn't it make more sense to only add 'b', etc.
> > to the mode flag instead ?!
> 
> The 'b' is not necessary, as it is always added by zipfile.py
> when the file is opened.  The [rwa] each do something
> different, and aren't really the same as a file open.  I
> am not sure what you mean here.

Sorry, I was only reading the code and got the impression that
mode testing was done on the complete string you pass to the
constructor ... I missed the line "key = mode[0]".
 
> > The ZipFile is also missing some kind of method which
> > extracts files in the ZIP archive to a file-like object. This
> > would be very useful for extracting large files from a ZIP
> > archive without having to first read in the whole file into
> > memory.
> 
> The "read(self, name)" method returns the bytes, which you can
> write to a file if you want.  What new method would you like?

I would like a method .copy(self, name, output) which
reads the file name from the ZIP archive and writes it directly to
the file-like object output. This should copy the file in chunks
of say 64kB in order to reduce memory load.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
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