Sending multiple .CSV files to .ZIP without storing to disk in Python

Question

I\'m working on a reporting application for my Django powered website. I want to run several reports and have each report generate a .csv file in memory that can be download

Answer 1

The stdlib comes with the module zipfile, and the main class, ZipFile, accepts a file or file-like object:

from zipfile import ZipFile
temp_file = StringIO.StringIO()
zipped = ZipFile(temp_file, 'w')

# create temp csv_files = [(name1, data1), (name2, data2), ... ]

for name, data in csv_files:
    data.seek(0)
    zipped.writestr(name, data.read())

zipped.close()

temp_file.seek(0)

# etc. etc.

I'm not a user of StringIO so I may have the seek and read out of place, but hopefully you get the idea.