autoopen

autoopen is a small drop-in replacement for the most common use cases of Python’s built-in open() function that will automatically handle compressed files based on the filename.

Usage

For example:

from autoopen import autoopen

filename = "example.txt.xz"
with autoopen(filename, "rt", encoding="utf-8") as file:
    contents = file.read()

autoopen will check the given filename’s last suffix. If it indicates one of the supported compressors, the corresponding compressor or decompressor will be used, otherwise it falls back to built-in open.

Support for .gz, .bz2, .xz, .lzma, and .zst/.zstd is built-in (the latter requires the python-zstandard package). The special filename - indicates reading from stdin or writing to stdout.