arlib 0.0.3

Common interface for archive manipulation

arlib: Common interface for archive manipulation

Table of Contents

• Installation
  • Install from PyPI
  • Install from Anaconda
• Simple example
  • Open archive
  • List member names
  • Open a member
  • License
• Documentation

Rationale

Sometimes, we need to deal with different archive files. There are several packages/modules for archive file manipulation, e.g., zipfile for "*.zip" files, tarfile for "*.tar.gz" or "*.tar.bz2" files, etc. If we want to support different archive type in our project, probably we need to do the following:

if zipfile.is_zipfile(file):
    ar = zipfile.ZipFile(file)
    f = ar.open('member-name')
    # some processing
elif zipfile.is_tarfile(file):
    ar = tarfile.open(file)
    f = ar.extractfile('member-name')
    # some processing
else:
    # other stuffs

The problems of the above approach are:

• We need repeat the above code everywhere we want to support different archive types.
• Different archive manipulation modules (e.g. zipfile and tarfile) may have different API convention.

arlib is designed to solve the above problems. It abstracts the logic of archive manipulations and provides a single high level interface for users.

Installation

Install from PyPI

pip install arlib

Install from Anaconda

conda install -c liyugong arlib

Simple example

The simplest way to use arlib is through the arlib.Archive class.

Open archive

By construct an arlib.Archive object, we can open an archive file for read or write.

The constructor of arlib.Archive also works as a factory which automatically create engine with type determined by the file properties and the mode argument. Therefore,

ar = arlib.Archive('abc.tar.gz', 'r')

will create an object of type arlib.TarArchive, and

ar = arlib.Archive('abc.zip', 'r')

will create an object of type arlib.ZipArchive if the corresponding files exist and are real tar or zip files.

List member names

The property member_names will return a list of the names of members contained in the archive, e.g.,

print(ar.member_names)

Open a member

Use the method open_member to open a member in the archive as a file object

with ar.open_member('a.txt', 'r') as f:
    # do sth by using f as an opened file object

License

The arlib package is released under the MIT License

Documentation

https://arlib.readthedocs.io/en/latest/