Python: Creating a streaming gzip'd file-like?

Question

I'm trying to figure out the best way to compress a stream with Python's zlib.

I've got a file-like input stream (input, below) and an output function which accepts a file-like (output_function, below):

with open("file") as input:
    output_function(input)

And I'd like to gzip-compress input chunks before sending them to output_function:

with open("file") as input:
    output_function(gzip_stream(input))

It looks like the gzip module assumes that either the input or the output will be a gzip'd file-on-disk… So I assume that the zlib module is what I want.

However, it doesn't natively offer a simple way to create a stream file-like… And the stream-compression it does support comes by way of manually adding data to a compression buffer, then flushing that buffer.

Of course, I could write a wrapper around zlib.Compress.compress and zlib.Compress.flush (Compress is returned by zlib.compressobj()), but I'd be worried about getting buffer sizes wrong, or something similar.

So, what's the simplest way to create a streaming, gzip-compressing file-like with Python?

Edit: To clarify, the input stream and the compressed output stream are both too large to fit in memory, so something like output_function(StringIO(zlib.compress(input.read()))) doesn't really solve the problem.

Answer 1

Use the cStringIO (or StringIO) module in conjunction with zlib:

>>> import zlib
>>> from cStringIO import StringIO
>>> s.write(zlib.compress("I'm a lumberjack"))
>>> s.seek(0)
>>> zlib.decompress(s.read())
"I'm a lumberjack"

Answer 2

The gzip module supports compressing to a file-like object, pass a fileobj parameter to GzipFile, as well as a filename. The filename you pass in doesn't need to exist, but the gzip header has a filename field which needs to be filled out.

Update

This answer does not work. Example:

# tmp/try-gzip.py 
import sys
import gzip

fd=gzip.GzipFile(fileobj=sys.stdin)
sys.stdout.write(fd.read())

output:

===> cat .bash_history  | python tmp/try-gzip.py  > tmp/history.gzip
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "tmp/try-gzip.py", line 7, in <module>
    sys.stdout.write(fd.read())
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/gzip.py", line 254, in read
    self._read(readsize)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/gzip.py", line 288, in _read
    pos = self.fileobj.tell()   # Save current position
IOError: [Errno 29] Illegal seek

Answer 3

Here is a cleaner, non-self-referencing version based on Ricardo Cárdenes' very helpful answer.

from gzip import GzipFile
from collections import deque


CHUNK = 16 * 1024


class Buffer (object):
    def __init__ (self):
        self.__buf = deque()
        self.__size = 0
    def __len__ (self):
        return self.__size
    def write (self, data):
        self.__buf.append(data)
        self.__size += len(data)
    def read (self, size=-1):
        if size < 0: size = self.__size
        ret_list = []
        while size > 0 and len(self.__buf):
            s = self.__buf.popleft()
            size -= len(s)
            ret_list.append(s)
        if size < 0:
            ret_list[-1], remainder = ret_list[-1][:size], ret_list[-1][size:]
            self.__buf.appendleft(remainder)
        ret = ''.join(ret_list)
        self.__size -= len(ret)
        return ret
    def flush (self):
        pass
    def close (self):
        pass


class GzipCompressReadStream (object):
    def __init__ (self, fileobj):
        self.__input = fileobj
        self.__buf = Buffer()
        self.__gzip = GzipFile(None, mode='wb', fileobj=self.__buf)
    def read (self, size=-1):
        while size < 0 or len(self.__buf) < size:
            s = self.__input.read(CHUNK)
            if not s:
                self.__gzip.close()
                break
            self.__gzip.write(s)
        return self.__buf.read(size)

Advantages:

• Avoids repeated string concatenation, which would cause the entire string to be copied repeatedly.
• Reads a fixed CHUNK size from the input stream, instead of reading whole lines at a time (which can be arbitrarily long).
• Avoids circular references.
• Avoids misleading public "write" method of GzipCompressStream(), which is really only used internally.
• Takes advantage of name mangling for internal member variables.

Answer 4

It's quite kludgy (self referencing, etc; just put a few minutes writing it, nothing really elegant), but it does what you want if you're still interested in using gzip instead of zlib directly.

Basically, GzipWrap is a (very limited) file-like object that produces a gzipped file out of a given iterable (e.g., a file-like object, a list of strings, any generator...)

Of course, it produces binary so there was no sense in implementing "readline".

You should be able to expand it to cover other cases or to be used as an iterable object itself.

from gzip import GzipFile

class GzipWrap(object):
    # input is a filelike object that feeds the input
    def __init__(self, input, filename = None):
        self.input = input
        self.buffer = ''
        self.zipper = GzipFile(filename, mode = 'wb', fileobj = self)

    def read(self, size=-1):
        if (size < 0) or len(self.buffer) < size:
            for s in self.input:
                self.zipper.write(s)
                if size > 0 and len(self.buffer) >= size:
                    self.zipper.flush()
                    break
            else:
                self.zipper.close()
            if size < 0:
                ret = self.buffer
                self.buffer = ''
        else:
            ret, self.buffer = self.buffer[:size], self.buffer[size:]
        return ret

    def flush(self):
        pass

    def write(self, data):
        self.buffer += data

    def close(self):
        self.input.close()