Programming ArcGIS 10.1 with Python Cookbook

Creating ZIP files

GIS often requires the use of large files that will be compressed into a .zip format for ease of sharing. Python includes a module that you can use to decompress and compress files in this format.

Getting ready

Zip is a common compression and archive format and is implemented in Python through the zipfile module. The ZipFile class can be used to create, read, and write .zip files. To create a new .zip file, simply provide the filename along with a mode such as w, which indicates that you want to write data to the file. In the following code example, we are creating a .zip file called datafile.zip. The second parameter, w, indicates that a new file will be created. A new file will be created or an existing file with the same name ...