How do you read a file inside a zip file as text, not bytes?

Question

A simple program for reading a CSV file inside a zip file works in Python 2.7, but not in Python 3.2

$ cat test_zip_file_py3k.py 
import csv, sys, zipfile

z         


        

Answer 1

Lennart's answer is on the right track (Thanks, Lennart, I voted up your answer) and it almost works:

$ cat test_zip_file_py3k.py 
import csv, io, sys, zipfile

zip_file    = zipfile.ZipFile(sys.argv[1])
items_file  = zip_file.open('items.csv', 'rU')
items_file  = io.TextIOWrapper(items_file, encoding='iso-8859-1', newline='')

for idx, row in enumerate(csv.DictReader(items_file)):
    print('Processing row {0}'.format(idx))

$ python3.1 test_zip_file_py3k.py ~/data.zip
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "test_zip_file_py3k.py", line 7, in 
    items_file  = io.TextIOWrapper(items_file, 
                                   encoding='iso-8859-1', 
                                   newline='')
AttributeError: readable

The problem appears to be that io.TextWrapper's first required parameter is a buffer; not a file object.

This appears to work:

items_file  = io.TextIOWrapper(io.BytesIO(items_file.read()))

This seems a little complex and also it seems annoying to have to read in a whole (perhaps huge) zip file into memory. Any better way?

Here it is in action:

$ cat test_zip_file_py3k.py 
import csv, io, sys, zipfile

zip_file    = zipfile.ZipFile(sys.argv[1])
items_file  = zip_file.open('items.csv', 'rU')
items_file  = io.TextIOWrapper(io.BytesIO(items_file.read()))

for idx, row in enumerate(csv.DictReader(items_file)):
    print('Processing row {0}'.format(idx))

$ python3.1 test_zip_file_py3k.py ~/data.zip
Processing row 0
Processing row 1
Processing row 2
...
Processing row 250