Python has great in-built support for all sorts of text compressionincluding bzip, gzip, tarfile and other general purpose modules likezlib etc.Of these, I have a gripe with gzip - it does not provide a simpleway of compressing/uncompressing a string like the other modulesto (namely bzip, zlib) at the module level.It is relatively easy to perform gzip de-compression using theGzipFile class and StringIO objects, but compression is notthat straight-forward.It would be great for the gzip module to have "compress"and "uncompress" functions at the module level without havingto go through GzipFile every-time.I think being able to send gzip compressed strings directly would beuseful for applications which require to send gzip data over the wirewithout having to write to files and read-back.

Uploading a file containing two functions which can be used to providecompress/uncompress on gzip.This is not a patch to gzip.py, but a stand-alone file. It this looksfine, I will make a patch.

I think the functionality is useful, although it may be too late to makeit into 2.6/3.0. Some comments:- the functions should have docstrings- there should be unit tests- style nit: named parameters in function calls (and default values infunction declarations) shouldn't have spaces around the '=' sign

Thanks. The file I uploaded was not an actual patch but just how thefunctions would appear in the gzip module, to illustrate the code.I can make an actual patch to gzip.py with docstrings, unit-tests andtaking care of your other comments. Do you think this will be in timefor Python 3.0 ? I can do this right away.

I have uploaded the actual patch file which can be applied against thegzip.py module. I did not modify the _test() function since it iswritten for testing file compression. I can modify test_gzip.py if thispatch is accepted.

Uploading the svn diff.

Added test case in test_gzip.py. Attaching svn diff of the same.

Can we include this for the next release ?

Seems simple enough, I don't see why not.

The patch lacks a documentation update, though.(seeDoc/library/gzip.rst)

Ok, I will add this.

Uploading fresh gzip.py SVN diff with a minor change, i.e accepting aregular string as argument, aka zlib.compress.

Uploading rst documentation svn diff for module.

This appears to have slipped under the radar,msg94432 seems to sum it up.  Could someone please take this forward.

Modified patch committed inr84155 (py3k). Thanks for your contribution!

Okay. Verified as working. Thank you!