Is there an equivalent of gzip.open() for .7z files?

Question

I have to frequently search through a couple of .7z (zipped with LZMA) files. I don't have enough memory to have them unpacked at the same time or to change the archive to .gz. At the moment I unpack one, search for what I need, delete what was extracted, unpack the next. I want to go through the archives in the same way as with gzip:

f = gzip.open('archive.gz')
for i in f:
    do stuff

Is there a module/way to do this with .7z files?

Answer 1

There is a built in module in Python >= 3.3: http://docs.python.org/3.3/library/lzma

And there is also a backport of the module on the PyPI: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/backports.lzma

(If you're on Windows and you don't want to compile it by yourself you can use the PyLZMA package from Unofficial Windows Binaries for Python).