Download and extract a tarball in Python

A simple method for downloading a tarball from the internet and then extracting its contents in Python.

This procedure will require the urllib and tarfile packages in Python.

Firstly, download the file of interest from the internet. In this example, I am targeting a training set of images for TensorFlow, saved as a TGZ file.

from urllib.request import urlretrieve
url = "https://storage.googleapis.com/download.tensorflow.org/example_images/flower_photos.tgz"
target = "/home/adamdimech/.keras/datasets/flower_photos.tgz"
dir = "/home/adamdimech/.keras/datasets/"
urlretrieve(url, target)

The target variable describes the name and location of the file that is to be saved, whilst dir contains the parent directory which will be used to describe where the contents of the tarball will be extracted.

Next, extract the contents of the tarball:

import tarfile
file = tarfile.open(target)
file.extractall(dir)
file.close()

In this case, the files will be saved to /home/adamdimech/.keras/datasets/flower_photos.

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