python-lz4

Overview

This package provides bindings for the lz4 compression library by Yann Collet.

Code specific to this project is covered by the BSD 3-Clause License

Install

The package is hosted on PyPI:

$ pip install lz4
$ easy_install lz4

Usage

The library is pretty simple to use:

>>> import lz4
>>> compressed_data = lz4.dumps(data)
>>> data == lz4.loads(compressed_data)
True
>>>

Methods and Constants

The bindings provides some aliases too:

>>> import lz4
>>> lz4.LZ4_compress == lz4.compress == lz4.dumps
True
>>> lz4.LZ4_uncompress == lz4.uncompress == z4.decompress == lz4.loads
True
>>> lz4.VERSION == lz4.__version__  # e.g. "0.7.0"
True
>>>

Is it fast ?

Yes. Here are the results on my 2011 Macbook Pro i7 with lz4.c as input data:

$ python tests/bench.py
Data Size:
  Input: 24779
  LZ4: 10152 (0.41)
  Snappy: 9902 (0.40)
  LZ4 / Snappy: 1.025247
Benchmark: 200000 calls
  LZ4 Compression: 9.737272s
  Snappy Compression: 18.012336s
  LZ4 Decompression: 2.686854s
  Snappy Decompression : 5.146867s

Important note

Because LZ4 doesn't define a container format, the python bindings will insert the original data size as an integer at the start of the compressed payload, like most bindings do anyway (Java...)