Looks like you'd have to use the more primitive .read() method: http://docs.python.org/library/zipfile.html#zipfile.ZipFile.read
Unfortunately, the ZipFile.read() reads the entire content. One of the main reasons to zip things is that they're big -- possibly too big to fit conveniently in memory. I don't know about the OP's use-case, so .read() might suffice if the resulting content is small enough. In my case[1], it was a zip containing multiple >700MB MS-Access .mdb files that I needed to stream to temporary disk storage and using .read() killed my dev machine.
-tkc [1] http://markmail.org/message/7vn5shss2h64yoop -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
