Downloading and unzipping a .zip file without writing to disk

Question

I have managed to get my first python script to work which downloads a list of .ZIP files from a URL and then proceeds to extract the ZIP files and writes them to disk.

Answer 1

My suggestion would be to use a StringIO object. They emulate files, but reside in memory. So you could do something like this:

# get_zip_data() gets a zip archive containing 'foo.txt', reading 'hey, foo'

import zipfile
from StringIO import StringIO

zipdata = StringIO()
zipdata.write(get_zip_data())
myzipfile = zipfile.ZipFile(zipdata)
foofile = myzipfile.open('foo.txt')
print foofile.read()

# output: "hey, foo"

Or more simply (apologies to Vishal):

myzipfile = zipfile.ZipFile(StringIO(get_zip_data()))
for name in myzipfile.namelist():
    [ ... ]

In Python 3 use BytesIO instead of StringIO:

import zipfile
from io import BytesIO

filebytes = BytesIO(get_zip_data())
myzipfile = zipfile.ZipFile(filebytes)
for name in myzipfile.namelist():
    [ ... ]