boltons/docs/ioutils.rst

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``ioutils`` - Input/Output Utilities
====================================
.. automodule:: boltons.ioutils
Spooled Temporary Files
-----------------------
Spooled Temporary Files are file-like objects that start out mapped to
in-memory objects, but automatically roll over to a temporary file once they
reach a certain (configurable) threshhold. Unfortunately the built-in
SpooledTemporaryFile class in Python does not implement the exact API that some
common classes like StringIO do. SpooledTemporaryFile also spools all of it's
in-memory files as cStringIO instances. cStringIO instances cannot be
deep-copied, and they don't work with the zip library either. This along with
the incompatible api makes it useless for several use-cases.
To combat this but still gain the memory savings and usefulness of a true
spooled file-like-object, two custom classes have been implemented which have
a compatible API.
.. _spooledbytesio:
SpooledBytesIO
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
.. autoclass:: boltons.ioutils.SpooledBytesIO
.. _spooledstringio:
SpooledStringIO
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
.. autoclass:: boltons.ioutils.SpooledStringIO
Examples
--------
It's not uncommon to find excessive usage of StringIO in older Python code. A
SpooledTemporaryFile would be a nice replacement if one wanted to reduce memory
overhead, but unfortunately it's api differs too much. This is a good candidate
for :ref:`spooledbytesio` as it is api compatible and thus may be used as a
drop-in replacement.
Old Code::
flo = StringIO()
flo.write(gigantic_string)
Updated::
from boltions.ioutils import SpooledBytesIO
flo = SpooledBytesIO()
flo.write(gigantic_string)
Another good use case is downloading a file from some remote location. It's
nice to keep it in memory if it's small, but writing a large file into memory
can make servers quite grumpy. If the file being downloaded happens to be a zip
file then things are worse. You can't use a normal SpooledTemporaryFile because
it isn't compatible. A :ref:`spooledbytesio` instance is a good alternative.
Here is a simple example using the requests library to download a zip file::
from zipfile import ZipFile
import requests
from boltons import ioutils
s = requests.Session()
r = s.get("http://127.0.0.1/test_file.zip", stream=True)
if r.status_code == 200:
flo = SpooledBytesIO()
r = self._get(url, stream=True)
if r.status_code == 200:
with ioutils.SpooledBytesIO() as flo:
for chunk in r.iter_content(chunk_size=64000):
flo.write(chunk)
flo.seek(0)
zip_doc = ZipFile(flo)
# Print all the files in the zip
print zip_doc.namelist()