Question

I need to read selected files, matching on the file name, from a remote zip archive using Python. I don’t want to save the full zip to a temporary file (it’s not that large, so I can handle everything in memory).

I’ve already written the code and it works, and I’m answering this myself so I can search for it later. But since evidence suggests that I’m one of the dumber participants on Stackoverflow, I’m sure there’s room for improvement.

Answer 1

Here’s how I did it (grabbing all files ending in ‘.ranks’):

import urllib2, cStringIO, zipfile  try:     remotezip = urllib2.urlopen(url)     zipinmemory = cStringIO.StringIO(remotezip.read())     zip = zipfile.ZipFile(zipinmemory)     for fn in zip.namelist():         if fn.endswith('.ranks'):             ranks_data = zip.read(fn)             for line in ranks_data.split('\n'):                 # do something with each line except urllib2.HTTPError:     # handle exception