For a client web project I needed to create a zip file containing a number of generated XML files. This isn’t something I need to do very often, so I briefly considered just writing the XML files to disk and running a zip command. Ugly, but surely trying to dig up a pleasant Python zip library would be more work?
Turns out Python has had a wonderful zip library in its standard library since 1.6! The zipfile module makes creating zip files a breeze:
import os from zipfile import ZipFile, ZIP_DEFLATED from django.template.defaultfilters import slugify from somewhere_else import render_spam_xml, render_egg_xml ZIP_PATH = "/some/system/path/for/zips" def create_zip(spam): spam_slug = slugify(spam.name) filename = "%s.zip" % spam_slug abspath = os.path.join(ZIP_PATH, filename) # Create zip z = ZipFile(abspath, "w", ZIP_DEFLATED) # Write spam xml directly to zip z.writestr("%s.xml" % spam_slug, render_spam_xml(spam)) # Write xml files to zip for egg in spam.egg_set.all(): egg_slug = slugify(egg.name) # Renders the egg object to an xml string xml = render_egg_xml(egg) # Note how easy it is to specify paths in the zip file: z.writestr("eggs/%s.xml" % egg_slug, xml) # Zip file must be closed to be valid z.close() return abspath
(Sorry for the Django bits in there, but they should be easy to replace.)
My favorite part is that you can use either the ZipFile.write method to add files to the zip or the ZipFile.writestr method to write bytes (strings in my case) directly to the zip file.
At any rate, just wanted to blog about it, so when I need to do it again in a few years I don’t do something stupid like running the zip command.
