Python 3.3 onwards includes module lzma
in the standard library, providing
support for working with LZMA and XZ compressed files via the XZ Utils C
library (XZ Utils is in a sense LZMA v2). See:
- Python's lzma - http://docs.python.org/dev/library/lzma.html
- XZ Utils - http://tukaani.org/xz/
This code is a backport of the Python 3.3 standard library module lzma
for
use on older versions of Python where it was not included. It is available
from PyPI (released downloads only) and GitHub (repository):
- PyPI - http://pypi.python.org/pypi/backports.lzma/
- GitHub - https://github.com/peterjc/backports.lzma
There are some older Python libraries like PylibLZMA and PyLZMA but these are both using LZMA Utils (not XZ Utils, so they have no XZ support).
- PylibLZMA - http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyliblzma
- PyLZMA - http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pylzma/
- LZMA Utils - http://tukaani.org/lzma/
The lmza
module provided with Python 3.3 should work on all the main
operating systems, so in theory so too should this backport:
- Mac OS X: Tested under Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.0 to 3.4 inclusive
- Linux: Tested under Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.0 to 3.6 inclusive
- Windows: Tested under Python 2.7, 3.6 covering 32-bit and 64-bit, and MSVC and mingw32 compilers
Other than some minor changes in the exceptions for some errors, based on the unit tests everything seems to be working fine.
Support under Python 2.6 and 2.7 appears to be working in that all the appropriate unit tests now pass. Supporting older verions of Python 2 is probably going to be too much work.
We now also support the PyPy implementation of Python 2.7, currently tested
with PyPy 5.8.0. It does not currently work on the PyPy implementation of
Python 3, but that comes with the lzma
standard library module anyway.
I recommend the Conda packaging system which supports Linux, MacOS and
Windows. Thanks to the conda-forge
package you should be able to install
this library with one line, and have the dependencies handled automatically:
$ conda install -c conda-forge backports.lzma
If you are on Linux, there is a good chance that the system packages will include this library and handle the dependencies, e.g. on RedHat/CentOS try:
$ sudo yum install python-backports-lzma
Otherwise, first you must install the XZ Utils C library. On RedHat or CentOS Linux sytems, try:
$ sudo yum install xz-devel
On a Debian based Linux distribution use:
$ sudo apt-get install liblzma-dev
Otherwise do this from source, this is what I do on Mac OS X:
$ curl -L -O http://tukaani.org/xz/xz-5.0.4.tar.gz $ tar -zxvf xz-5.0.4.tar.gz $ cd xz-5.0.4 $ ./configure --prefix=$HOME $ make $ make check $ make install
Now you can install this lzma
backport. If using pip
, this should
work:
$ pip install backports.lzma
Otherwise, you can compile this the old fashioned way. First download and decompress the source code, or clone the github repository:
$ git clone git://github.com/peterjc/backports.lzma.git $ cd backports.lzma $ python setup.py install $ cd test $ python test_lzma.py
To install for a specific version of Python, replace python
(which will
use the system's default Python) in the above with a specific version like
python2
, python2.6
or python3
, python3.2
, etc.
This should find the XZ Util header file and library automatically (and will check for a local install under your home directory). You should now be able to import the backport from Python as shown below.
If you are trying to install this under the system Python, you will need
admin rights and replace python setup.py install
with
sudo python setup.py install
instead.
The expected usage is as follows if you want to prioritise the standard library provided lzma if present:
try: import lzma except ImportError: from backports import lzma #Then use lzma as normal, for example: assert b"Hello!" == lzma.decompress(lzma.compress(b"Hello!"))
Please refer to the lzma
documentation online:
http://docs.python.org/dev/library/lzma.html
Note that while lzma
should be available on Python 3.3 onwards, you can
still install the backport. This is useful for two reasons, first testing the
two act the same way, and second it is possible that your Python installation
lacks the standard library lzma
. This can happen if Python was installed
from source and XZ Utils was not available. If this was a systems level Python
install, as a user you could still install XZ Utils and this backport under
your own account.
This is using the shared backports
namespace introduced by Brandon Rhodes
as documented here: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/backports/ and
http://bitbucket.org/brandon/backports
- v0.0.1 - January 2013
- First public release
- v0.0.2 - April 2013
- Fix the seekable attribute on Python 2 (Tomer Chachamu)
- More search paths for lib/include headers (Wynn Wilkes)
- v0.0.3 - June 2014
- Supports unicode filenames on Python 2 (Irving Reid)
- v0.0.4 - September 2014
- Declare namespace package to avoid warnings (Ralph Bean)
(Later retracted from PyPI due to installation problems with
setuptools
versusdistutils
, see GitHub issue #8 and #9).
- Declare namespace package to avoid warnings (Ralph Bean)
(Later retracted from PyPI due to installation problems with
- v0.0.5 - June 2016
- Backported fix for Python Issue 19839 to ignore non-LZMA trailing data (original Python 3.5.1 patch by Nadeem Vawda, backported by Deroko, see GitHub pull request #5).
- v0.0.6 - June 2016
- Updated namespace packaging declaration now required by more recent versions of setuptools which prevented simple installation of v0.0.4 and v0.0.5 from PyPI.
- v0.0.7 - February 2017
- Check and prefer the
sys.prefix
at installation time to find thelib
andinclude
headers (John Kirkham).
- Check and prefer the
- v0.0.8 - February 2017
- Switch to using
README.rst
for this document in order to display nicely on PyPI.
- Switch to using
- v0.0.9 - 3 January 2018
- Now compiles under Windows with passing tests, checked under AppVeyor (see GitHub pull request #25 by Nehal J Wani).
- v0.0.10 - 8 January 2018
- Now supports PyPy (specifically their Python 2 implementation, but not yet pypy3 which implements Python 3; see GitHub pull requests #27 and #29 by Michał Górny).
- v0.0.11 - 16 May 2018
- Should address namespace issues in v0.0.4, v0.0.5 and v0.0.6 related to a problem in setuptools, and causing side effects with other backports (see pull request #32 from Toshio Kuratomi, and issues #8, #16 and #28).
- v0.0.12 - 30 June 2018
- Fixes locale issue in
setup.py
under Python 3 (see #33 reported by Ben Hearsum).
- Fixes locale issue in
- v0.0.13 - 11 July 2018
- Use
setuptools
instead ofdistutils
if available, useful for compiling your own wheel or egg files (see #34 from @wiggin15).
- Use
- v0.0.14 - 12 September 2019
- Back ported fix decompressing files using
FORMAT_ALONE
without end markers (see #40 from Ma Kin and Python issue 21872).
- Back ported fix decompressing files using
- Archived - 14 December 2021
- With Python 3.6 reaching end of life this month, there is even less reason to keep the repository live.
The initial Python lzma module implementation was by Per Øyvind Karlsen, which was then rewritten by Nadeem Vawda and included with Python 3.3. Based on this work, it was backported to also run on Python 2.6, 2.7 and 3.0, 3.1 and 3.2 by Peter Cock.
Later contributors include: Tomer Chachamu, Wynn Wilkes, Irving Reid, Ralph Bean, Deroko, John Kirkham, Nehal J Wani, Michał Górny, Toshio Kuratomi, Ma Lin.
Please report any reproducible bugs via the GitHub issue tracker at https://github.com/peterjc/backports.lzma/issues including details about your operating system, version of Python, XY Utils, the lzma backport etc. Reproducible test cases are particularly helpful.
If you can demonstrate a problem in this backport but not in the lzma
module included with Python 3.3 or later, then it is clearly something we
will need to fix.
Any issues in the lzma
module as bundled with Python 3.3 or later
should be reported to the Python project at http://bugs.python.org instead
(and we can hopefully apply any official fix to the backport as well).
The version is incremented in file backports/lzma/__init__.py
(from where
setup.py
will extract it at runtime).
After testing locally and with TravisCI (see below), new releases are tagged in git as follows:
$ git tag backports.lzma.vX.X.X
Tags must explicitly be pushed to GitHub:
$ git push origin master --tags
I then use the following to upload a new release to the Python Packaging Index (PyPI):
$ python setup.py sdist $ twine upload dist/backports.lzma-X.X.X.tar.gz
If not already installed, try pip install twine
.
The update then appears on http://pypi.python.org/pypi/backports.lzma/
TravisCI is being used for continuous integration testing under Linux, see https://travis-ci.org/peterjc/backports.lzma
Similarly, AppVeyor is being used for testing under Windows, see: https://ci.appveyor.com/project/peterjc/backports-lzma/history