Python has great in-built support for all sorts of text compression
including bzip, gzip, tarfile and other general purpose modules like
zlib etc.

Of these, I have a gripe with gzip - it does not provide a simple
way of compressing/uncompressing a string like the other modules
to (namely bzip, zlib) at the module level.

It is relatively easy to perform gzip de-compression using the
GzipFile class and StringIO objects, but compression is not
that straight-forward.

It would be great for the gzip module to have "compress"
and "uncompress" functions at the module level without having
to go through GzipFile every-time.

I think being able to send gzip compressed strings directly would be
useful for applications which require to send gzip data over the wire
without having to write to files and read-back.

Uploading a file containing two functions which can be used to provide
compress/uncompress on gzip.

This is not a patch to gzip.py, but a stand-alone file. It this looks
fine, I will make a patch.

I think the functionality is useful, although it may be too late to make
it 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 in
function declarations) shouldn't have spaces around the '=' sign

Thanks. The file I uploaded was not an actual patch but just how the
functions would appear in the gzip module, to illustrate the code.

I can make an actual patch to gzip.py with docstrings, unit-tests and
taking care of your other comments. Do you think this will be in time
for Python 3.0 ? I can do this right away.

I have uploaded the actual patch file which can be applied against the
gzip.py module. I did not modify the _test() function since it is
written for testing file compression. I can modify test_gzip.py if this
patch 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.
(see Doc/library/gzip.rst)

Ok, I will add this.

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

Uploading rst documentation svn diff for module.