Chapter 8. Data Compression and Archiving

Although modern computer systems have an ever-increasing storage capacity, the growth of data being produced is unrelenting. Lossless compression algorithms make up for some of the shortfall in capacity by trading time spent compressing or decompressing data for the space needed to store it. Python includes interfaces to the most popular compression libraries so it can read and write files interchangeably.

zlib and gzip expose the GNU zip library, and bz2 provides access to the more recent bzip2 format. Both formats work on streams of data, without regard to input format, and provide interfaces for reading and writing compressed files transparently. Use these modules for compressing a single file or data source.