rarfile

The interface resembles zipfile's interface.

The archive structure parsing and uncompressed files are handled in pure Python.

Decompression is done via 'unrar' command line utility.

Features:

• Understands Rar 3.x archives.
• Handles multi-volume archives.
• Handles stored files itself.
• Handles unicode names.
• Handles password-protected archives.
• Handles archive comments.
• For decompression uses external unrar command line utility.

What is new in this release:

• .read() and .readinto() now do looping read to work properly on short reads. Important for Python 3.2+ where read from pipe can return short result even on blocking file descriptor.
• Proper error reporting in .extract(), .extractall(), .testrar()
• .read() from unrar pipe: prefer to return unrar error code, if thats not available, do own error checks.
• Avoid string addition in .read(), instead use always list+join to merge multi-part reads.
• dumprar: dont re-encode byte strings (python 2.x). This avoids unnecessary failure when printing invalid Unicode.

What is new in version 2.4:

• Bug Fixes:
• USE_DATETIME: survive bad values from RAR.
• bug in corrupt unicode filename handling.
• dumprar: make unicode chars work with both pipe and console.

What is new in version 2.3:

• Features:
• Support .seek() method on file streams. (Kristian Larsson)
• Support .readinto() method on file streams. Optimized implementation is available on Python 2.6+ where memoryview is available.
• Support file comments - RarInfo.comment contains decompressed data if available.
• File objects returned by RarFile.open() are io.RawIOBase-compatible. They can further wrapped with io.BufferedReader` and ``io.TextIOWrapper.
• Now .getinfo() uses dict lookup instead of sequential scan when searching archive entry. This speeds up prococessing for archives that have many entries.
• Option rarfile.UNICODE_COMMENTS to decode both archive and file comments to unicode. It uses TRY_ENCODINGS for list of encodings to try. If off, comments are left as byte strings. Default: 0
• Option rarfile.PATH_SEP to change path separator. Default: r'\', set rarfile.PATH_SEP='/' to be compatibe with zipfile.
• Option rarfile.USE_DATETIME to convert timestamps to datetime objects. Default: 0, timestamps are tuples.
• Option rarfile.TRY_ENCODINGS to allow tuning attempted encoding list.
• Reorder RarInfo fiels to better show zipfile-compatible fields.
• Standard regtests to make sure various features work
• Compatibility:
• Drop RarInfo.unicode_filename, plain RarInfo.filename is already unicode since 2.0.
• .read(-1) reads now until EOF. Previously it returned empty buffer.
• Fixes:
• Make encrypted headers work with Python 3.x bytes() and with old 2.x 'sha' module.
• Simplify subprocess.Popen() usage when launching unrar. Previously it tried to optimize and work around OS/Python bugs, but this is not maintainable.
• Use temp rar file hack on multi-volume archives too.
• Always .wait() on unrar, to avoid zombies
• Convert struct.error to BadRarFile
• Plug some fd leaks. Affected: Jython, PyPy.
• Broken archives are handled more robustly.

What is new in version 2.2:

• Fixes:
• Relaxed volume naming. Now it just calculates new volume name by finding number in old one and increasing it, without any expectations what that number should be.
• Files with 4G of compressed data in one colume were handled wrong. Fix.
• DOS timestamp seconds need to be multiplied with 2.
• Correct EXTTIME parsing.
• Cleanups:
• Compressed size is per-volume, sum them together, so that user sees complete compressed size for files split over several volumes.
• dumprar: Show unknown bits.
• Use struct.Struct() to cache unpack formats.
• Support missing os.devnull. (Python 2.3)

What is new in version 2.1:

• Features:
• Minimal implmentation for .extract(), .extractall(), .testrar(). They are simple shortcuts to unrar invocation.
• Accept RarInfo object where filename is expected.
• Include dumprar.py in .tgz. It can be used to visualize RAR structure and test module.
• Support for encrypted file headers.
• Fixes:
• Don't read past ENDARC, there could be non-RAR data there.
• RAR 2.x: It does not write ENDARC, but our volume code expected it. Fix that.
• RAR 2.x: Support more than 200 old-style volumes.
• Cleanups:
• Load comment only when requested.
• Cleanup of internal config variables. They should have now final names.
• .open(): Add mode=r argument to match zipfile.
• Doc and comments cleanup, minimize duplication.
• Common wrappers for both compressed and uncompressed files, now .open() also does CRC-checking.

What is new in version 2.0:

• Features:
• Python 3 support. Still works with 2.x.
• Parses extended time fields. (.mtime, .ctime, .atime)
• .open() method. This makes possible to process large entries that do not fit into memory.
• Supports password-protected archives.
• Supports archive comments.
• Cleanups:
• Uses subprocess module to launch unrar.
• .filename is always Unicode string, .unicode_filename is now deprecated.
• .CRC is unsigned again, as python3 crc32() is unsigned.