lz4 0.3.0

LZ4 Bindings for Python

Overview

This package provides bindings for the lz4 compression library by Yann Collet.

Install

The package is hosted on PyPI:

$ pip install lz4
$ easy_install lz4

Usage

The library is pretty simple to use:

>>> import lz4
>>> compressed_data = lz4.dumps(data)
>>> data == lz4.loads(compressed_data)
True
>>>

Methods

The bindings provides some aliases too:

>>> import lz4
>>> lz4.LZ4_compress == lz4.compress == lz4.dumps
True
>>> lz4.LZ4_uncompress == lz4.uncompress == lz4.loads
True
>>>

Is it fast ?

Yes. Here are the results on my 2011 Macbook Pro i7 with 128kb random data:

$ python tests/bench.py
Data Size:
  Input: 131072
  LZ4: 131601
  Snappy: 131087
  LZ4 / Snappy: 1.003921
Benchmark: 200000 calls
  LZ4 Compression: 3.651002s
  Snappy Compression: 8.066482s
  LZ4 Decompression: 1.482934s
  Snappy Decompression : 3.193481s

Important note

Because LZ4 doesn’t define a container format, the python bindings will insert the original data size as an integer at the start of the compressed payload, like most bindings do anyway (Java…)