How can unrar a file with python

Question

How can I extract a .zip or .rar file using Python?

Answer 1

Late, but I wasn't satisfied with any of the answers.

pip install patool
import patoolib
patoolib.extract_archive("foo_bar.rar", outdir="path here")

Works on Windows and linux without any other libraries needed.

Answer 2

Try the pyunpack package:

from pyunpack import Archive
Archive('a.zip').extractall('/path/to')

Answer 3

A good package for it is rarfile :

Infos and docs here :

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/rarfile/

https://rarfile.readthedocs.io/api.html

Answer 4

After some deep diving, here are my findings:

• RAR is not an free open format and is owned by RARLabs. You must install their DLL or exe first to work with RAR. Some programs like 7zip might already include this with them.
• patool is application that provides uniform command line as wrapper to other external compression applications. Natively, it can only deal with TAR, ZIP, BZIP2 and GZIP without needing external support.
• pyunpack is Python library that can only deal with zip natively but provides interface to patool.

With this in mind, following things worked for me:

• Make sure 7zip is installed
• pip install patool pyunpack

Then to use it,

import pyunpack

pyunpack.Archive(archive_file).extractall(extract_dir)

Answer 5

• How to unzip a file with Python 2.4?
• https://pypi.python.org/pypi/rarfile/

Answer 6

This method only requires having 7zip installed.
Works flawlessly on every system 7zip does.
No python packages needed at all.

import subprocess
subprocess.run('7z x -oOutdir archive.rar')

The subprocess module is comes with python.