Hi, In python, is there a distinction between unzipping bytes and unzipping a binary file to which those bytes have been written?
The following code is, I think, an example of writing bytes to a file and then unzipping... decoded = base64.b64decode(datum) #datum is a base64 encoded string of data downloaded from a web service f = open('data.zip', 'wb') f.write(decoded) f.close() x = zipfile.ZipFile('data.zip', 'r') After looking at the preceding code, the provider of the web service gave me this advice... "Instead of trying to create a file, take the unzipped bytes and get a Unicode string of text from it." If so, I'm not sure how to do what he's suggesting, or if it's really different from what I've done. I find that I am able to unzip the resulting data.zip using the unix unzip command, but the file inside contains some FFFD characters, as described in this thread... http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_thread/thread/4f57abea978cc0bf?hl=en# I don't know if the unwanted characters might be the result of my trying to write and unzip a file, rather than unzipping the bytes. The file does contain a semblance of what I ultimately want -- it's not all garbage. Apologies if it's not appropriate to start a new thread for this. It just seems like a different topic than how to deal with the resulting FFFD characters. Thanks for your help, Ryan -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list