Book Image

Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

By : Alessandro Molina
Book Image

Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

By: Alessandro Molina

Overview of this book

The Python 3 Standard Library is a vast array of modules that you can use for developing various kinds of applications. It contains an exhaustive list of libraries, and this book will help you choose the best one to address specific programming problems in Python. The Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook begins with recipes on containers and data structures and guides you in performing effective text management in Python. You will find Python recipes for command-line operations, networking, filesystems and directories, and concurrent execution. You will learn about Python security essentials in Python and get to grips with various development tools for debugging, benchmarking, inspection, error reporting, and tracing. The book includes recipes to help you create graphical user interfaces for your application. You will learn to work with multimedia components and perform mathematical operations on date and time. The recipes will also show you how to deploy different searching and sorting algorithms on your data. By the end of the book, you will have acquired the skills needed to write clean code in Python and develop applications that meet your needs.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Zipping a directory


Archive files are a good way to distribute whole directories as if they were a single file and to reduce the size of the distributed files.

Python has built-in support for creating ZIP archive files, which can be leveraged to compress a whole directory.

How to do it...

The steps for this recipes are as follows:

  1. The zipfile module allows us to create compressed ZIP archives made up of multiple files:
import zipfile
import os

def zipdir(archive_name, directory):
    with zipfile.ZipFile(
        archive_name, 'w', compression=zipfile.ZIP_DEFLATED
    ) as archive:
        for root, dirs, files in os.walk(directory):
            for filename in files:
                abspath = os.path.join(root, filename)
                relpath = os.path.relpath(abspath, directory)
                archive.write(abspath, relpath)        
  1. Using zipdir is as simple as providing a name for the .zip file that should be created and a path for the directory that should be archived:
zipdir('/tmp/test...