How to compress a file with bzip2 in Python?

Question

Here is what I have:

import bz2

compressionLevel = 9
source_file = '/foo/bar.txt' #this file can be in a different format, like .csv or others...
destination_file = '/foo/bar.bz2'

tarbz2contents = bz2.compress(source_file, compressionLevel)
fh = open(destination_file, "wb")
fh.write(tarbz2contents)
fh.close()

I know first param of bz2.compress is a data, but it's the simple way that I found to clarify what I need.

And I know about BZ2File but, I cannot find any good example to use BZ2File.

Answer 1

The documentation for bz2.compress for says it takes data, not a file name.
Try replacing the line below:

tarbz2contents = bz2.compress(open(source_file, 'rb').read(), compressionLevel)

...or maybe :

with open(source_file, 'rb') as data:
    tarbz2contents = bz2.compress(data.read(), compressionLevel)