distinction between unzipping bytes and unzipping a file

[webcomm]

On Jan 9, 4:12 pm, "Chris Mellon" <arka... at gmail.com> wrote:
> It would really help if you could post a sample file somewhere.

Here's a sample with some dummy data from the web service:
http://webcomm.webfactional.com/htdocs/data.zip

That's the zip created in this line of my code...
f = open('data.zip', 'wb')

If I open the file it contains as unicode in my text editor (EditPlus)
on Windows XP, there is ostensibly nothing wrong with it.  It looks
like valid XML.  But if I return it to my browser with python+django,
there are bad characters every other character

If I unzip it like this...
popen("unzip data.zip")
...then the bad characters are 'FFFD' characters as described and
pictured here...
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_thread/thread/4f57abea978cc0bf?hl=en#

If I unzip it like this...
getzip('data.zip', ignoreable=30000)
...using the function at...
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/msg/c2008e48368c6543
...then the bad characters are \x00 characters.