zipfile — Work with ZIP archives

Source code: Lib/zipfile/

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 handle multipart 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 cannot create an encrypted file. Decryption is extremely slow as it is implemented in native Python rather than C.

Handling compressed archives requires optional modules such as zlib, bz2, lzma, and compression.zstd. If any of them are missing from your copy of CPython, look for documentation from your distributor (that is, whoever provided Python to you). If you are the distributor, see Requirements for optional modules.

The module defines the following items:

exception zipfile.BadZipFile

The error raised for bad ZIP files.

Added 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.Path

Class that implements a subset of the interface provided by pathlib.Path, including the full importlib.resources.abc.Traversable interface.

Added in version 3.8.

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.

Changed in version 3.13: A public compress_level attribute has been added to expose the formerly protected _compresslevel. The older protected name continues to work as a property for backwards compatibility.

_for_archive(archive)

Resolve the date_time, compression attributes, and external attributes to suitable defaults as used by ZipFile.writestr().

Returns self for chaining.

Added in version 3.14.

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.

Added in version 3.3.

zipfile.ZIP_LZMA

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

Added in version 3.3.

zipfile.ZIP_ZSTANDARD

The numeric constant for Zstandard compression. This requires the compression.zstd module.

Note

In APPNOTE 6.3.7, the method ID 20 was assigned to Zstandard compression. This was changed in APPNOTE 6.3.8 to method ID 93 to avoid conflicts, with method ID 20 being deprecated. For compatibility, the zipfile module reads both method IDs but will only write data with method ID 93.

Added in version 3.14.

Note

The ZIP file format specification has included support for bzip2 compression since 2001, for LZMA compression since 2006, and Zstandard compression since 2020. 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.

ZipFile objects

class zipfile.ZipFile(file, mode='r', compression=ZIP_STORED, allowZip64=True, compresslevel=None, *, strict_timestamps=True, metadata_encoding=None)

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'