If I have the contents of a zipfile in a Python string, can I decompress it without writing it to a file?

Question

I\'ve written some Python code that fetches a zip file from the web and into a string:

In [1]: zip_contents[0:5]
Out[1]: \'PK\\x03\\x04\\x14\'

Answer 1

Wrap your string in a cStringIO object. It looks, acts, and quacks like a file object, but resides in memory.

Answer 2

zipfile.ZipFile accepts any file-like object, so you can use StringIO (2.x) or BytesIO (3.x):

try:
  from cStringIO import StringIO
except:
  from StringIO import StringIO
import zipfile

fp = StringIO('PK\x03\x04\x14')
zfp = zipfile.ZipFile(fp, "r")