Question

I snagged a Lorem Ipsupm generator last week, and I admit, it’s pretty cool.

My question: can someone show me a tutorial on how the author of the above script was able to post the contents of a gzipped file into their code as a string? I keep getting examples of gzipping a regular file, and I’m feeling kind of lost here.

For what it’s worth, I have another module that is quite similar (it generates random names, companies, etc), and right now it reads from a couple different text files. I like this approach better; it requires one less sub-directory in my project to place data into, and it also presents a new way of doing things for me.

I’m quite new to streams, IO types, and the like. Feel free to dump the links on my lap. Snipptes are always appreciated too.

Answer 1

I’m not sure exactly what you’re asking, but here’s a stab…

The author of lipsum.py has included the compressed data inline in their code as chunks of Base64 encoded text. Base64 is an encoding mechanism for representing binary data using printable ASCII characters. It can be used for including binary data in your Python code. It is more commonly used to include binary data in email attachments…the next time someone sends you a picture or PDF document, take a look at the raw message and you’ll see very much the same thing.

Python’s base64 module provides routines for converting between base64 and binary representations of data…and once you have the binary representation of the data, it doesn’t really matter how you got, whether it was by reading it from a file or decoding a string embedded in your code.

Python’s gzip module can be used to decompress data. It expects a file-like object…and Python provides the StringIO module to wrap strings in the right set of methods to make them act like files. You can see that in lipsum.py in the following code:

sample_text_file = gzip.GzipFile(mode='rb',
    fileobj=StringIO(base64.b64decode(DEFAULT_SAMPLE_COMPRESSED)))

This is creating a StringIO object containing the binary representation of the base64 encoded value stored in DEFAULT_SAMPLE_COMPRESSED.

All the modules mentioned here are described in the documentation for the Python standard library.

I wouldn’t recommend including data in your code inline like this as a good idea in general, unless your data is small and relatively static. Otherwise, package it up into your Python package which makes it easier to edit and track changes.

Have I answered the right question?