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

[Barton David]

Oh... of course. Thanks and sorry for missing the bleeding obvious.

Mind you, when reading in 'txt mode' rather than binary, len() actually
gives a much *smaller* size than getsize. Does the conversion into txt
happen to introduce some sort of terminator character that stops
file.read() from going to the end?

Dave


-----Original Message-----
From: Kent Johnson [mailto:kent37 at tds.net] 
Sent: 20 February 2007 12:53
To: Barton David
Cc: tutor at python.org
Subject: Re: [Tutor] file.read() doesn't give full contents of
compressed files

Barton David wrote:
> 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?

Why do you think it stops reading? len() should be giving a bigger
number than getsize() because you are reading the file in text mode
which will convert \n to \r\n. Try file("mytestfile","rb").

Kent


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