Untar files with python and extract certain files with tarfile.extractall() python

Question

I am trying to untar files with tarfile.extractall() so that I can get a subset of the images in the directory by using the optional parameter 'members'.

I have an array containing the filenames of all the files that I would like to extract that I am passing in here but from what I understand they should be TarInfo objects. How can I turn my array of file names into an array of TarInfo objects? Or is there a better way to do this?

t = tarfile.open(filename, 'r')
t.extractall(out_dir, filearray)

Answer 1

If it is a requirement to use extractall , you first need to generate a list of tarinfo objects that match with filearray

members = [ x for x in t.getmembers() if x.name in filearray]

You can then pass that into extractall

t.extractall(out_dir, members)