Search code examples
pythonbytegzipbytesio

Writing then reading in-memory bytes (BytesIO) gives a blank result


I wanted to try out the python BytesIO class.

As an experiment I tried writing to a zip file in memory, and then reading the bytes back out of that zip file. So instead of passing in a file-object to gzip, I pass in a BytesIO object. Here is the entire script:

from io import BytesIO
import gzip

# write bytes to zip file in memory
myio = BytesIO()
with gzip.GzipFile(fileobj=myio, mode='wb') as g:
    g.write(b"does it work")

# read bytes from zip file in memory
with gzip.GzipFile(fileobj=myio, mode='rb') as g:
    result = g.read()

print(result)

But it is returning an empty bytes object for result. This happens in both Python 2.7 and 3.4. What am I missing?


Solution

  • You need to seek back to the beginning of the file after writing the initial in memory file...

    myio.seek(0)