Extract files from zip without keeping the structure using python ZipFile?

Question

I try to extract all files from .zip containing subfolders in one folder. I want all the files from subfolders extract in only one folder without keeping the original structure. At the moment, I extract all, move the files to a folder, then remove previous subfolders. The files with same names are overwrited.

Is it possible to do it before writing files?

Here is a structure for example:

my_zip/file1.txt
my_zip/dir1/file2.txt
my_zip/dir1/dir2/file3.txt
my_zip/dir3/file4.txt

At the end I whish this:

my_dir/file1.txt
my_dir/file2.txt
my_dir/file3.txt
my_dir/file4.txt

What can I add to this code ?

import zipfile
my_dir = "D:\\Download\\"
my_zip = "D:\\Download\\my_file.zip"

zip_file = zipfile.ZipFile(my_zip, 'r')
for files in zip_file.namelist():
    zip_file.extract(files, my_dir)
zip_file.close()

if I rename files path from zip_file.namelist(), I have this error:

KeyError: "There is no item named 'file2.txt' in the archive"

Answer 1

This opens file handles of members of the zip archive, extracts the filename and copies it to a target file (that's how ZipFile.extract works, without taken care of subdirectories).

import os
import shutil
import zipfile

my_dir = r"D:\Download"
my_zip = r"D:\Download\my_file.zip"

with zipfile.ZipFile(my_zip) as zip_file:
    for member in zip_file.namelist():
        filename = os.path.basename(member)
        # skip directories
        if not filename:
            continue

        # copy file (taken from zipfile's extract)
        source = zip_file.open(member)
        target = open(os.path.join(my_dir, filename), "wb")
        with source, target:
            shutil.copyfileobj(source, target)