How do I gzip compress a string in Python?

Question

How do I gzip compress a string in Python?

gzip.GzipFile exists, but that's for file objects - what about with plain strings?

Answer 1

If you want to produce a complete gzip-compatible binary string, with the header etc, you could use gzip.GzipFile together with StringIO:

try:
    from StringIO import StringIO  # Python 2.7
except ImportError:
    from io import StringIO  # Python 3.x
import gzip
out = StringIO()
with gzip.GzipFile(fileobj=out, mode="w") as f:
  f.write("This is mike number one, isn't this a lot of fun?")
out.getvalue()

# returns '\x1f\x8b\x08\x00\xbd\xbe\xe8N\x02\xff\x0b\xc9\xc8,V\x00\xa2\xdc\xcc\xecT\x85\xbc\xd2\xdc\xa4\xd4"\x85\xfc\xbcT\x1d\xa0X\x9ez\x89B\tH:Q!\'\xbfD!?M!\xad4\xcf\x1e\x00w\xd4\xea\xf41\x00\x00\x00'