Question

I have multiple zip files that have the same structure — they contain XML files at the root level. All files in each zip file are unique (no duplicates across the zip files). I need to combine all of the XML files from all of the zip files into a single zip file (with the same structure as the original zip files). Suggestions for how to best go about doing this? Thanks.

Answer 1

This is the shortest version I could come up with:

>>> import zipfile as z
>>> z1 = z.ZipFile('z1.zip', 'a')
>>> z2 = z.ZipFile('z2.zip', 'r')
>>> z1.namelist()
['a.xml', 'b.xml']
>>> z2.namelist()
['c.xml', 'd.xml']
>>> [z1.writestr(t[0], t[1].read()) for t in ((n, z2.open(n)) for n in z2.namelist())]
[None, None]
>>> z1.namelist()
['a.xml', 'b.xml', 'c.xml', 'd.xml']
>>> z1.close()

Without testing the alternative, to me this is the best (and probably most obvious too!) solution because – assuming both zip files contains the same amount of data, this method requires the decompression and re-compression of only half of it (1 file).

PS: List comprehension is there just to keep instructions on one line in the console (which speeds debugging up). Good pythonic code would require a proper for loop, given that the resulting list serves no purpose…

HTH!