Python 3.3 onwards includes in the standard library module 'lzma', providing support for working with LZMA and XZ compressed files via the XZ Utils C library (XZ Utils is in a sense LZMA v2). See:
- Python's lzma - http://docs.python.org/dev/library/lzma.html
- XZ Utils - http://tukaani.org/xz/
This code is a backport of the Python 3.3 standard library module 'lzma' for use on older versions of Python where it was not included. It is available from PyPI (released downloads only) and GitHub (repository):
- PyPI - http://pypi.python.org/pypi/backports.lzma/
- GitHub - https://github.com/peterjc/backports.lzma
There are some older Python libraries like PylibLZMA and PyLZMA but these are both using LZMA Utils (not XZ Utils, so they have no XZ support).
- PylibLZMA - http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyliblzma
- PyLZMA - http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pylzma/
- LZMA Utils - http://tukaani.org/lzma/
The 'lmza' module provided with Python 3.3 should work on all the main operating systems, so in theory so too should this backport:
- Mac OS X: Tested under Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.0 to 3.4 inclusive
- Linux: Tested under Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.0 to 3.6 inclusive
- Windows: Untested (so far)
Other than some minor changes in the exceptions for some errors, based on the unit tests everything seems to be working fine.
Support under Python 2.6 and 2.7 appears to be working in that all the appropriate unit tests now pass. Supporting older verions of Python 2 is probably going to be too much work.
First you must install the XZ Utils C library, which on a Debian based Linux distribution can be done in one line:
$ sudo apt-get install liblzma-dev
Otherwise do this from source, this is what I do on Mac OS X:
$ curl -O http://tukaani.org/xz/xz-5.0.4.tar.gz $ tar -zxvf xz-5.0.4.tar.gz $ cd xz-5.0.4 $ ./configure --prefix=$HOME $ make $ make check $ make install
Now you can install this 'lzma' backport. First download and decompress the source code, or clone the github repository:
$ git clone git://github.com/peterjc/backports.lzma.git $ cd backports.lzma $ python setup.py install $ cd test $ python test_lzma.py
To install for a specific version of Python, replace python (which will
use the system's default Python) in the above with a specific version like
python2, python2.6 or python3, python3.2, etc.
This should find the XZ Util header file and library automatically (and will check for a local install under your home directory). You should now be able to import the backport from Python as shown below.
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If you are trying to install this under the system Python, you will need
admin rights and replace python setup.py install with
sudo python setup.py install instead.
The expected usage is as follows if you want to prioritise the standard library provided lzma if present:
try:
import lzma
except ImportError:
from backports import lzma
#Then use lzma as normal, for example:
assert b"Hello!" == lzma.decompress(lzma.compress(b"Hello!"))
Please refer to the 'lzma' documentation online: http://docs.python.org/dev/library/lzma.html
Note that while 'lzma' should be available on Python 3.3, you can still install the backport. This is useful for two reasons, first testing the two act the same way, and second it is possible that your Python installation lacks the standard library 'lzma'. This can happen if Python was installed from source and XZ Utils was not available. If this was a systems level Python install, as a user you could still install XZ Utils and this backport under your own account.
This is using the shared 'backports' namespace introduced by Brandon Rhodes as documented here: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/backports/ and http://bitbucket.org/brandon/backports
- v0.0.1 - January 2013
- First public release
- v0.0.2 - April 2013
- Fix the seekable attribute on Python 2 (Tomer Chachamu)
- More search paths for lib/include headers (Wynn Wilkes)
- v0.0.3 - June 2014
- Supports unicode filenames on Python 2 (Irving Reid)
- v0.0.4 - September 2014
- Declare namespace package to avoid warnings (Ralph Bean) (Later retracted from PyPI due to installation problems with
setuptoolsversusdistutils, see GitHub issue #8 and #9).
- v0.0.5 - June 2016
- Backported fix for Python Issue 19839 to ignore non-LZMA trailing data (original Python 3.5.1 patch by Nadeem Vawda, backported by Deroko, see GitHub pull request #5).
- v0.0.6 - June 2016
- Updated namespace packaging declaration now required by more recent versions of setuptools which prevented simple installation of v0.0.4 and v0.0.5 from PyPI.
- v0.0.7 - February 2017
- Check and prefer the
sys.prefixat installation time to find thelibandincludeheaders (John Kirkham).
- v0.0.8 - February 2017
- Switch to using
README.rstfor this document in order to display nicely on PyPI.
The initial Python lzma module implementation was by Per Øyvind Karlsen, which was then rewritten by Nadeem Vawda and included with Python 3.3. Based on this work, it was backported to also run on Python 2.6, 2.7 and 3.0, 3.1 and 3.2 by Peter Cock.
Later contributors include: Tomer Chachamu, Wynn Wilkes, Irving Reid, Ralph Bean, Deroko, John Kirkham.
Please report any reproducible bugs via the GitHub issue tracker at https://github.com/peterjc/backports.lzma/issues including details about your operating system, version of Python, XY Utils, the lzma backport etc. Reproducible test cases are particularly helpful.
If you can demonstrate a problem in this backport but not in the 'lzma' module included with Python 3.3 or later, then it is clearly something we will need to fix. Any issues in the 'lzma' module as bundled with Python 3.3 or later should be reported to the Python project at http://bugs.python.org instead.
The version is incremented in file backports/lzma/__init__.py (from where
setup.py will extract it at runtime).
After testing locally and with TravisCI (see below), new releases are tagged in git as follows:
$ git tag backports.lzma.vX.X.X
Tags must explicitly be pushed to GitHub:
$ git push origin master --tags
I then use the following to upload a new release to the Python Packaging Index (PyPI):
$ python setup.py register sdist upload
The update then appears on http://pypi.python.org/pypi/backports.lzma/
TravisCI is being used for continuous integration testing under Linux, see https://travis-ci.org/peterjc/backports.lzma
