Reading utf-8 characters from a gzip file in python

Question

Hi,

I am trying to read a gunzipped file (.gz) in python and am having some trouble.

I used the gzip module to read it but the file is encoded as a utf-8 text file so eventually it reads an invalid character and crashes.

Does anyone know how to read gzip files encoded as utf-8 files? I know that there's a codecs module that can help but I can't understand how to use it.

Thanks!

import string
import gzip
import codecs

f = gzip.open('file.gz','r')

engines = {}
line = f.readline()
while line:
    parsed = string.split(line, u'\u0001')

    #do some things...

    line = f.readline()
for en in engines:
  print(en)

Answer 1

I don't see why this should be so hard.

What are you doing exactly? Please explain "eventually it reads an invalid character".

It should be as simple as:

import gzip
fp = gzip.open('foo.gz')
contents = fp.read() # contents now has the uncompressed bytes of foo.gz
fp.close()
u_str = contents.decode('utf-8') # u_str is now a unicode string

Answer 2

Maybe

import codecs
zf = gzip.open(fname, 'rb')
reader = codecs.getreader("utf-8")
contents = reader( zf )
for line in contents:
    pass

Answer 3

In pythonic form (2.5 or greater)

from __future__ import with_statement # for 2.5, does nothing in 2.6
from gzip import open as gzopen

with gzopen('foo.gz') as gzfile:
    for line in gzfile:
      print line.decode('utf-8')