Extract TXT Files from ZIP File Using Python

Python provides a built-in module called zipfile that allows us to create, read, write, and extract ZIP archives.

When we want to extract only specific files, such as all .txt files, then we can perform filtering of the file names using string methods such as endswith().

A ZIP file is one of the archive formats which is used to compress one or more files into a single file to easily store and transfer data. It reduces the file size and keeps all related files compressed together for sharing over the internet and for saving disk space.

Steps involved in Zip file Extraction

Following are the steps we need to follow while extracting all the text files from a zip file using Python -

• Import the zipfile and os modules.
• Open the ZIP file using zipfile.ZipFile() method.
• Get the list of all files using namelist() method.
• Filter the files that end with .txt.
• Extract the matched files to a specified directory using the extract() method.

In this article, we will see the different methods of extracting text files from a zip file using Python.

Extracting .txt Files using extract() Method

When we want to extract the .txt extension files from a Zip Archive, then we can extract them to a target directory with the help of the extract() method of the zipfile module to get all the individual entries with internal folder structure.

Example

Here is an example of extracting all the text files from a zip archive using the extract() method -

import zipfile
import os

# Path to your ZIP archive
zip_path = r"D:\Tutorialspoint\Articles\archive.zip"

# Directory where .txt files will be extracted
output_dir = 'text_files'
os.makedirs(output_dir, exist_ok=True)

with zipfile.ZipFile(zip_path, 'r') as zip_ref:
   for member in zip_ref.namelist():
      # Filter for .txt files (case-insensitive)
      if member.lower().endswith('.txt'):
         zip_ref.extract(member, output_dir)
         print(f"Extracted: {member}")

Here is the output of the above program -

Extracted: docs/notes.txt
Extracted: readme.txt
Extracted: logs/today_log.txt

Extracting .txt Files Using Path.suffix in Python

When we are working with ZIP files in Python, we may want to extract only specific file types, such as .txt files.

In such cases, we have the Path.suffix() function in Python's pathlib module, which is used to check file extensions in a better way than traditional string methods.

Example

Below is an example that is used to extract the text files from the zip file using Python's path.suffix() method -

from pathlib import Path
import zipfile
import os

# Path to the ZIP file
zip_path = r"D:\Tutorialspoint\Articles\archive.zip"

# Folder to extract .txt files into
output_dir = 'only_txt_files'
os.makedirs(output_dir, exist_ok=True)

with zipfile.ZipFile(zip_path, 'r') as zip_ref:
   for file in zip_ref.namelist():
      if Path(file).suffix.lower() == '.txt':
         zip_ref.extract(file, output_dir)
         print(f"Extracted: {file}")

Following is the output of the above example -

Extracted: notes/info.txt
Extracted: logs/report.txt