Documentation example using gzip in combination with pathlib

[dennisvang]

Documentation

The gzip documentation provides some examples of usage.

I wonder if it would be possible (and desirable) to add an example using gzip with pathlib.

For example, this snippet from the documentation uses gzip.open() together with shutil:

Example of how to GZIP compress an existing file:

import gzip
import shutil
with open('/home/joe/file.txt', 'rb') as f_in:
  with gzip.open('/home/joe/file.txt.gz', 'wb') as f_out:
       shutil.copyfileobj(f_in, f_out)

Something similar can be done using pathlib and gzip.compress(), as follows:

import gzip
import pathlib
path_in = pathlib.Path('/home/joe/file.txt')
path_out = path_in.with_suffix(path_in.suffix + '.gz')
path_out.write_bytes(gzip.compress(path_in.read_bytes()))

Although, I'm not sure if this is better or worse than the shutil example, in terms of memory usage, etc., I do like the readability of the pathlib oneliner.

An additional advantage is that we can now set the mtime argument, which is not explicitly supported by gzip.open(). For example:

path_out.write_bytes(gzip.compress(data=path_in.read_bytes(), mtime=...))

Update:

A notable difference between the gzip.open() approach vs the gzip.compress() approach is that the latter does not include the filename in the gzip header. Also see GzipFile docs and rfc1952.