Get uncompressed size of a .gz file in python

Question

Using gzip, tell() returns the offset in the uncompressed file.
In order to show a progress bar, I want to know the original (uncompressed) size of the file.
Is there an easy way to find out?

Answer 1

Uncompressed size is stored in the last 4 bytes of the gzip file. We can read the binary data and convert it to an int. (This will only work for files under 4GB)

import struct

def getuncompressedsize(filename):
    with open(filename, 'rb') as f:
        f.seek(-4, 2)
        return struct.unpack('I', f.read(4))[0]

Answer 2

import gzip

File = gzip.open("input.gz", "r")
Size = gzip.read32(File)

Answer 3

    f = gzip.open(filename)
    # kludge - report uncompressed file position so progess bars
    # don't go to 400%
    f.tell = f.fileobj.tell

Answer 4

Despite what the other answers say, the last four bytes are not a reliable way to get the uncompressed length of a gzip file. First, there may be multiple members in the gzip file, so that would only be the length of the last member. Second, the length may be more than 4 GB, in which case the last four bytes represent the length modulo 2³². Not the length.

However for what you want, there is no need to get the uncompressed length. You can instead base your progress bar on the amount of input consumed, as compared to the length of the gzip file, which is readily obtained. For typical homogenous data, that progress bar would show exactly the same thing as a progress bar based instead on the uncompressed data.