Python - error when zipping files, 'L' format requires 0 <= number <= 4294967295

Question

I run this code for zipping folders and files.

def save_folder_as_zip(self, folder_to_zip, save_as):
    zipf = zipfile.ZipFile(str(save_as), mode="w", allowZip64=True)
    self.create_zip(zipf, folder_to_zip)
    zipf.close()

    return zipf

def create_zip(self, zipf, directory, folder=""):

    directory = directory.encode("utf-8")

    for item in os.listdir(directory):
        if temp_folder == directory + os.sep:
            continue

        try:
            if os.path.isfile(os.path.join(directory, item)):
                zipf.write(os.path.join(directory, item), folder + os.sep + item)
            elif os.path.isdir(os.path.join(directory, item)):
                self.create_zip(zipf, os.path.join(directory, item).decode("utf-8"), folder + os.sep + item)
        except Exception, e:
            self.schedule.machine.log_warning(str(e))

But then I get this error:

'L' format requires 0 <= number <= 4294967295

Example on filename where this happens:

/[Wii]TrackMania[PAL][WiiSOS.com]/ws_tramap.iso

Any ideas how I can fix this?

Traceback:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "test.py", line 29, in <module>
   save_folder_as_zip("/Users/f/Downloads/", "hei.zip")
File "test.py", line 13, in save_folder_as_zip
   create_zip(zipf, folder_to_zip)
File "test.py", line 26, in create_zip
   create_zip(zipf, os.path.join(directory, item).decode("utf-8"), folder + os.sep + item)  
File "test.py", line 24, in create_zip
   zipf.write(os.path.join(directory, item), folder + os.sep + item)
File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/zipfile.py", line 1100, in write
   zinfo.file_size))
struct.error: 'L' format requires 0 <= number <= 4294967295

Answer 1

I think it can be fixed applying the patch attached to this bug report:

http://bugs.python.org/issue9720

The problem arises when the file you are trying to include in the zip file is larger than 2^32-1 bytes in original or compressed form. In this scenario the library need to store -1 as the file size/compressed size and has to allocate some extra fields to store the actual size, which does not fit in a 32-bit dword.

For some reason the patch has not been accepted in 3.2 or 2.7.2+, but I have tested it and it works OK. I think it does not fix some corner case with writestr() method, but if you only use write() to store files it works great.