reading tar file contents without untarring it, in python script

Question

I have a tar file which has number of files within it. I need to write a python script which will read the contents of the files and gives the count o total characters, including total number of letters, spaces, newline characters, everything, without untarring the tar file.

Answer 1

you can use getmembers()

>>> import  tarfile
>>> tar = tarfile.open("test.tar")
>>> tar.getmembers()

After that, you can use extractfile() to extract the members as file object. Just an example

import tarfile,os
import sys
os.chdir("/tmp/foo")
tar = tarfile.open("test.tar")
for member in tar.getmembers():
    f=tar.extractfile(member)
    content=f.read()
    print "%s has %d newlines" %(member, content.count("
"))
    print "%s has %d spaces" % (member,content.count(" "))
    print "%s has %d characters" % (member, len(content))
    sys.exit()
tar.close()

With the file object f in the above example, you can use read(), readlines() etc.