Unzipping files in Python

I read through the zipfile documentation, but couldn't understand how to unzip a file, only how to zip a file. How do I unzip all the contents of a zip file into the same directory?

import zipfile
with zipfile.ZipFile(path_to_zip_file, 'r') as zip_ref:
    zip_ref.extractall(directory_to_extract_to)

That's pretty much it!

If you are using Python 3.2 or later:

import zipfile
with zipfile.ZipFile("file.zip","r") as zip_ref:
    zip_ref.extractall("targetdir")

You dont need to use the close or try/catch with this as it uses the context manager construction.

zipfile is a somewhat low-level library. Unless you need the specifics that it provides, you can get away with shutil's higher-level functions make_archive and unpack_archive.

make_archive is already described in this answer. As for unpack_archive:

import shutil
shutil.unpack_archive(filename, extract_dir)

unpack_archive detects the compression format automatically from the "extension" of filename (.zip, .tar.gz, etc), and so does make_archive. Also, filename and extract_dir can be any path-like objects (e.g. pathlib.Path instances) since Python 3.7.

Use the extractall method, if you're using Python 2.6+

zip = ZipFile('file.zip')
zip.extractall()