13.5. zipfile — Work with ZIP archives

Source code: Lib/zipfile.py

The ZIP file format is a common archive and compression standard. This module provides tools to create, read, write, append, and list a ZIP file. Any advanced use of this module will require an understanding of the format, as defined in PKZIP Application Note.

This module does not currently handle multi-disk ZIP files. It can handle ZIP files that use the ZIP64 extensions (that is ZIP files that are more than 4 GiB in size). It supports decryption of encrypted files in ZIP archives, but it currently cannot create an encrypted file. Decryption is extremely slow as it is implemented in native Python rather than C.

The module defines the following items:

exception zipfile.BadZipFile

The error raised for bad ZIP files.

New in version 3.2.

exception zipfile.BadZipfile

Alias of BadZipFile, for compatibility with older Python versions.

Deprecated since version 3.2.

exception zipfile.LargeZipFile

The error raised when a ZIP file would require ZIP64 functionality but that has not been enabled.

class zipfile.ZipFile

The class for reading and writing ZIP files. See section ZipFile Objects for constructor details.

class zipfile.PyZipFile

Class for creating ZIP archives containing Python libraries.

class zipfile.ZipInfo(filename='NoName', date_time=(1980, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0))

Class used to represent information about a member of an archive. Instances of this class are returned by the getinfo() and infolist() methods of ZipFile objects. Most users of the zipfile module will not need to create these, but only use those created by this module. filename should be the full name of the archive member, and date_time should be a tuple containing six fields which describe the time of the last modification to the file; the fields are described in section ZipInfo Objects.

zipfile.is_zipfile(filename)

Returns True if filename is a valid ZIP file based on its magic number, otherwise returns False. filename may be a file or file-like object too.

Changed in version 3.1: Support for file and file-like objects.

zipfile.ZIP_STORED

The numeric constant for an uncompressed archive member.

zipfile.ZIP_DEFLATED

The numeric constant for the usual ZIP compression method. This requires the zlib module.

zipfile.ZIP_BZIP2

The numeric constant for the BZIP2 compression method. This requires the bz2 module.

New in version 3.3.

zipfile.ZIP_LZMA

The numeric constant for the LZMA compression method. This requires the lzma module.

New in version 3.3.

Note

The ZIP file format specification has included support for bzip2 compression since 2001, and for LZMA compression since 2006. However, some tools (including older Python releases) do not support these compression methods, and may either refuse to process the ZIP file altogether, or fail to extract individual files.

See also

PKZIP Application Note

Documentation on the ZIP file format by Phil Katz, the creator of the format and algorithms used.

Info-ZIP Home Page

Information about the Info-ZIP project’s ZIP archive programs and development libraries.

13.5.1. ZipFile Objects

class zipfile.ZipFile(file, mode='r', compression=ZIP_STORED, allowZip64=True)

Open a ZIP file, where file can be a path to a file (a string), a file-like object or a path-like object. The mode parameter should be 'r' to read an existing file, 'w' to truncate and write a new file, 'a' to append to an existing file, or 'x' to exclusively create and write a new file. If mode is 'x' and file refers to an existing file, a FileExistsError will be raised. If mode is 'a' and file refers to an existing ZIP file, then additional files are added to it. If file does not refer to a ZIP file, then a new ZIP archive is appended to the file. This is meant for adding a ZIP archive to another file (such as python.exe). If mode is 'a' and the file does not exist at all, it is created. If mode is 'r' or 'a', the file should be seekable. compression is the ZIP compression method to use when writing the archive, and should be ZIP_STORED, ZIP_DEFLATED, ZIP_BZIP2 or ZIP_LZMA; unrecognized values will cause NotImplementedError to be raised. If ZIP_DEFLATED, ZIP_BZIP2 or ZIP_LZMA is specified but the corresponding module (zlib, bz2 or lzma) is not available, RuntimeError is raised. The default is ZIP_STORED. If allowZip64 is True (the default) zipfile will create ZIP files that use the ZIP64 extensions when the zipfile is larger than 4 GiB. If it is false zipfile will raise an exception when the ZIP file would require ZIP64 extensions.

If the file is created with mode 'w', 'x' or 'a' and then closed without adding any files to the archive, the appropriate ZIP structures for an empty archive will be written to the file.

ZipFile is also a context manager and therefore supports the with statement. In the example, myzip is closed after the with statement’s suite is finished—even if an exception occurs:

with ZipFile('spam.zip', 'w') as myzip:
    myzip.write('eggs.txt')

New in version 3.2: Added the ability to use ZipFile as a context manager.

Changed in version 3.3: Added support for bzip2 and lzma compression.

Changed in version 3.4: ZIP64 extensions are enabled by default.

Changed in version 3.5: Added support for writing to unseekable streams. Added support for the 'x' mode.

Changed in version 3.6: Previously, a plain RuntimeError was raised for unrecognized compression values.

Changed in version 3.6.2: The file parameter accepts a path-like object.

ZipFile.close()

Close the archive file. You must call close() before exiting your program or essential records will not be written.

ZipFile.getinfo(name)

Return a ZipInfo object with information about the archive member name. Calling getinfo() for a name not currently contained in the archive will raise a KeyError.

ZipFile.infolist()

Return a list containing a ZipInfo object for each member of the archive. The objects are in the same order as their entries in the actual ZIP file on disk if an existing archive was opened.

ZipFile.namelist()

Return a list of archive members by name.

ZipFile.open(name, mode='r', pwd=None, *, force_zip64=False)

Access a member of the archive as a binary file-like object. name can be either the name of a file within the archive or a ZipInfo object. The mode parameter, if included, must be 'r' (the default) or 'w'. pwd is the password used to decrypt encrypted ZIP files.

open() is also a context manager and therefore supports the with statement:

with ZipFile('spam.zip') as myzip:
    with myzip.open('eggs.txt') as myfile:
        print(myfile.read())

With mode 'r' the file-like object (ZipExtFile) is read-only and provides the following methods: read(), readline(), readlines(), __iter__(), __next__(). These objects can operate independently of the ZipFile.

With mode='w', a writable file handle is returned, which supports the write() method. While a writable file handle is open, attempting to read or write other files in the ZIP file will raise a ValueError.

When writing a file, if the file size is not known in advance but may exceed 2 GiB, pass force_zip64=True to ensure that the header format is capable of supporting large files. If the file size is known in advance, construct a ZipInfo object with file_size set, and use that as the name parameter.

Note

The open(), read() and extract() methods can take a filename or a ZipInfo object. You will appreciate this when trying to read a ZIP file that contains members with duplicate names.

Changed in version 3.6: Removed support of mode='U'. Use io.TextIOWrapper for reading compressed text files in universal newlines mode.

Changed in version 3.6: open() can now be used to write files into the archive with the mode='w' option.

Changed in version 3.6: Calling open() on a closed ZipFile will raise a ValueError. Previously, a