webcomm wrote:
Hi,
In python, is there a distinction between unzipping bytes and
unzipping a binary file to which those bytes have been written?
Python's zipfile module can only read and write zip files; it can't
compress or decompress data as a bytestring.
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.
If what you've been given is data which has been zipped and then base-64
encoded, then I can't see that you might be doing wrong.
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.
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