gzip.GzipFile

class gzip.GzipFile(filename=None, mode=None, compresslevel=9, fileobj=None, mtime=None)

Constructor for the GzipFile class, which simulates most of the methods of a file object, with the exception of the truncate() method. At least one of fileobj and filename must be given a non-trivial value.

The new class instance is based on fileobj, which can be a regular file, an io.BytesIO object, or any other object which simulates a file. It defaults to None, in which case filename is opened to provide a file object.

When fileobj is not None, the filename argument is only used to be included in the gzip file header, which may include the original filename of the uncompressed file. It defaults to the filename of fileobj, if discernible; otherwise, it defaults to the empty string, and in this case the original filename is not included in the header.

The mode argument can be any of 'r', 'rb', 'a', 'ab', 'w', 'wb', 'x', or 'xb', depending on whether the file will be read or written. The default is the mode of fileobj if discernible; otherwise, the default is 'rb'.

Note that the file is always opened in binary mode. To open a compressed file in text mode, use open() (or wrap your GzipFile with an io.TextIOWrapper).

The compresslevel argument is an integer from 0 to 9 controlling the level of compression; 1 is fastest and produces the least compression, and 9 is slowest and produces the most compression. 0 is no compression. The default is 9.

The mtime argument is an optional numeric timestamp to be written to the last modification time field in the stream when compressing. It should only be provided in compression mode. If omitted or None, the current time is used. See the mtime attribute for more details.

Calling a GzipFile object’s close() method does not close fileobj, since you might wish to append more material after the compressed data. This also allows you to pass an io.BytesIO object opened for writing as fileobj, and retrieve the resulting memory buffer using the io.BytesIO object’s getvalue() method.

GzipFile supports the io.BufferedIOBase interface, including iteration and the with statement. Only the truncate() method isn’t implemented.

GzipFile also provides the following method and attribute:

peek(n)

Read n uncompressed bytes without advancing the file position. At most one single read on the compressed stream is done to satisfy the call. The number of bytes returned may be more or less than requested.

Note

While calling peek() does not change the file position of the GzipFile, it may change the position of the underlying file object (e.g. if the GzipFile was constructed with the fileobj parameter).

New in version 3.2.

mtime

When decompressing, the value of the last modification time field in the most recently read header may be read from this attribute, as an integer. The initial value before reading any headers is None.

All gzip compressed streams are required to contain this timestamp field. Some programs, such as gunzip, make use of the timestamp. The format is the same as the return value of time.time() and the st_mtime attribute of the object returned by os.stat().