Hello,

this snippet does not work, because GzipFile wants a file-like object that can do tell() and seek():

#!/usr/bin/python

import gzip
from urllib import urlopen

zfd = urlopen("http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/sid/Contents-udeb.gz")
fd = gzip.GzipFile(fileobj=zfd, mode="r")
for line in fd:
    foobar(line)

It must be possible to build a decompressing file-like object wrapper that can do without seeking, since it is obviously not a limitation of gzip decompression libraries. It would be extremely useful to have such a thing, as shown in the example snippet above.

Some more details (including a very annoying misrepresentation of the issue found in Dive Into Python) can be found at http://www.enricozini.org/2011/cazzeggio/python-gzip/ (I apologise about the ranting tone of the post).