Tarfile Tip

Working with tar files and attempting to create a py.test fixture of a tar file and I ran into an issue.

I’m using TarFile package on python 3.5

My initial fixture was setup as;

@pytest.fixture
def file_tar(tmpdir, tmpdir_factory):
    fn = tmpdir_factory.mktemp("tar").join("test.tar")
    tf = tarfile.TarFile(str(fn), "w")
    p1 = tmpdir.mkdir("src1").join("test1.txt")
    p1.write("text 1 content")
    tf.add(p1)
    p2 = tmpdir.mkdir("src2").join("test2.txt")
    p2.write("text 2 content")
    tf.add(str(p2))
    tf.close()
    return fn

But I ended up with an empty file in the tar’d file fixture, and that was causing issues when attempting to extract the contents of the tar’d file. As it is an empty file and results in the following error/exception tarfile.ReadError: empty file

Changing the fixture to the following, resolved the issue;

@pytest.fixture
def file_tar(tmpdir, tmpdir_factory):
    fn = tmpdir_factory.mktemp("tar").join("test.tar")
    p1 = tmpdir.mkdir("src1").join("test1.txt")
    p1.write("text 1 content")
    p2 = tmpdir.mkdir("src2").join("test2.txt")
    p2.write("text 2 content")
    with tarfile.open(str(fn), "w") as tf:
        tf.add(p1)
        tf.add(str(p2))
    return fn

I guess that is more pythonic as well.