Question

I want to read a file and write it back out. Here’s my code:

   file = open( zipname , 'r' )
   content =  file.read() 
   file.close()

   alt = open('x.zip', 'w')
   alt.write(content )
   alt.close()

This doesn’t work, why?????

Edit:

The rewritten file is corrupt
(python 2.7.1 on windows)

Answer 1

Read and write in the binary mode, ‘rb’ and ‘wb’:

f = open(zipname , 'rb')
content =  f.read() 
f.close()

alt = open('x.zip', 'wb')
alt.write(content )
alt.close()

The reason the text mode didn’t work on Windows is that the newline translation from ‘\r\n’ to ‘\r’ mangled the binary data in the zip file.