I seems that you need to look into Python zlib library instead

The GZIP format relies on zlib, but introduces a file-level compression concept along with CRC checking, and this appears to be what you do not want/need at the moment.

See for example these code snippets from Dough Hellman

Edit: the code on Doubh Hellman s site only show how to compress or decompress with zlib. As indicated above, GZIP is "zlib with an envelope", and you ll need to decode the envellope before getting to the zlib-compressed data per se. Here s more info to go about it, it s really not that complicated:

• see RFC 1952 for details about the GZIP format
• This format starts with a 10 bytes header, followed by optional, non compressed elements such as the file name or a comment, followed by the zlib-compressed data, itself followed by a CRC-32 (precisely an "Adler32" CRC).
• By using Python s struct module, parsing the header should be relatively simple
• The zlib sequence (or its first few thousand bytes, since that is what you want to do) can then be decompressed with python s zlib module, as shown in the examples above
• Possible problems to handle: if there are more than one file in the GZip archive, and if the second file starts within the block of a few thousand bytes we wish to decompress.

Sorry to provide neither an simple procedure nor a ready-to-go snippet, however decoding the file with the indication above should be relatively quick and simple.

The issue with the gzip module is not that it can t decompress the partial file, the error occurs only at the end when it tries to verify the checksum of the decompressed content. (The original checksum is stored at the end of the compressed file so the verification will never, ever work with a partial file.)

The key is to trick gzip into skipping the verification. The answer by caesar0301 does this by modifying the gzip source code, but it s not necessary to go that far, simple monkey patching will do. I wrote this context manager to temporarily replace gzip.GzipFile._read_eof while I decompress the partial file:

import contextlib

@contextlib.contextmanager
def patch_gzip_for_partial():
    """
    Context manager that replaces gzip.GzipFile._read_eof with a no-op.

    This is useful when decompressing partial files, something that won t
    work if GzipFile does it s checksum comparison.

    """
    _read_eof = gzip.GzipFile._read_eof
    gzip.GzipFile._read_eof = lambda *args, **kwargs: None
    yield
    gzip.GzipFile._read_eof = _read_eof

An example usage:

from cStringIO import StringIO

with patch_gzip_for_partial():
    decompressed = gzip.GzipFile(StringIO(compressed)).read()

I can t see any possible reason why you would want to decompress the first 2000 compressed bytes. Depending on the data, this may uncompress to any number of output bytes.

Surely you want to uncompress the file, and stop when you have uncompressed as much of the file as you need, something like:

f = gzip.GzipFile(fileobj=open( postcode-code.tar.gz ,  rb ))
data = f.read(4000)
print data

AFAIK, this won t cause the whole file to be read. It will only read as much as is necessary to get the first 4000 bytes.

I also encounter this problem when I use my python script to read compressed files generated by gzip tool under Linux and the original files were lost.

By reading the implementation of gzip.py of Python, I found that gzip.GzipFile had similar methods of File class and exploited python zip module to process data de/compressing. At the same time, the _read_eof() method is also present to check the CRC of each file.

But in some situations, like processing Stream or .gz file without correct CRC (my problem), an IOError("CRC check failed") will be raised by _read_eof(). Therefore, I try to modify the gzip module to disable the CRC check and finally this problem disappeared.

def _read_eof(self):
    pass

https://github.com/caesar0301/PcapEx/blob/master/live-scripts/gzip_mod.py

I know it s a brute-force solution, but it save much time to rewrite yourself some low level methods using the zip module, like of reading data chuck by chuck from the zipped files and extract the data line by line, most of which has been present in the gzip module.

Jamin