python write string directly to tarfile

Question

Is there a way to write a string directly to a tarfile? From http://docs.python.org/library/tarfile.html it looks like only files already written to the file system can be a

Answer 1

As Stefano pointed out, you can use TarFile.addfile and StringIO.

import tarfile, StringIO

data = 'hello, world!'

tarinfo = tarfile.TarInfo('test.txt')
tarinfo.size = len(data)

tar = tarfile.open('test.tar', 'a')
tar.addfile(tarinfo, StringIO.StringIO(data))
tar.close()

You'll probably want to fill other fields of tarinfo (e.g. mtime, uname etc.) as well.