I was writing some scripts today and part of it is to compress some files. I normally make an external application call to 7-Zip command line when I do this, but then I decided to just do a quick Google search to see if Python has one built in.

It turned out there’s this zipfile module that’s part of the standard library that can compress and decompress files for you (only the standard ZIP compression method is supported).

Here are a couple examples:

Zipping a File

import zipfile

sourceFile = r"C:\ziptest\testfile.txt"
outputFile = r"C:\ziptest\testfile.zip"

try:
    zipper = zipfile.ZipFile(outputFile, "w", zipfile.ZIP_DEFLATED)
    zipper.write(sourceFile)
except zipfile.BadZipfile as zipfileException:
    print zipfileException
finally:
    zipper.close()

Unzipping a File

import zipfile

sourceFile = r"C:\ziptest\testfile.zip"
outputFolder = r"C:\ziptest\unzipped"

try:
    unzipper = zipfile.ZipFile(sourceFile)
    unzipper.extractall(outputFolder)
except zipfile.BadZipfile as zipfileException:
    print zipfileException
finally:
    unzipper.close()