Question

Wondering if there’s someone here with some experience with gzip format. I have a very large gzip file that I need to parse. However, I may only need a small portion of the decompressed text file. Is is possible to stream this zip file without decompressing the entire file?

Anyone experience with gzip?

Answer 1

You do realise that you can stream using standard java library classes right? It’s quite trivial, something like:

GZIPInputStream stream = new GZIPInputStream(new FileInputStream("some_file.gz"));
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(stream);

// Now read line by line... till you hit the content you want.

The entire file is not decompressed on the disk, just chunks as you need it in memory. And you can optionally re-compress and write back out again using the corresponding output streams.