[Tutor] using tarfile on strings or filelike objects

[Kent Johnson]

Barton David wrote:
> I like that I can access the contents of a zip archive that's stored in 
> memory (rather than on disk) by packing the archive contents into a 
> StringIO or cStringIO object and feeding that to ZipFile...
>  
> i.e.
>  
> filelike=cStringIO.StringIO(archive_as_string)
> zf=zipfile.ZipFile(filelike)
> content=zf.read(archive_member_name)
> zf.close()
> filelike.close()
>  
> but I can't get the same thing to work with TarFile. Is there any way to 
> do this? (Other than first saving the archive data to disk and then 
> passing the path to TarFile.open?) The tarfile module documentation 
> talks about an optional fileobj flag but this doesn't seem to work.

Just from reading the docs I would try
filelike = cStringIO...
tf = tarfile.open(mode='r|', fileobj=filelike)

This is based on the example in the docs of reading from stdin.

Kent