[Tutor] file.read() doesn't give full contents of compressed files

[Barton David]

Hi,
I'm really confused, and I hope somebody can explain this for me...
 
I've been playing with compression and archives, and have some .zip,
.tar, .gz and .tgz example files to test my code on.
I can read them using either zipfile, tarfile, gzip or zlib, and that's
fine. But just reading them in 'raw' doesn't give me the whole string of
(compressed) bytes.
 
i.e...
 
len( file("mytestfile","r").read() ) != os.path.getsize("mytestfile")
 
Not even close, in fact. It seems like file.read() just stops after
reading a small portion of each example file, but why would that happen?
And what could I do if I wanted to read in the entire (compressed)
contents as a string?
 
thanks for any insight,
 
Dave (using Python 2.4 and windows)

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