zipfile2 contains an improved ZipFile class that may be used as a 100 % backward compatible replacement.

Improvements compared to upstream zipfile stdlib:

• Handling of symlinks (read and write)
• Compatible 2.6 onwards (including 3.x), include context manager
• Raises an exception by default when duplicate members are detected.
• Special class LeanZipFile to avoid using too much memory when handling zip files with a large number of members. Contrary to the stdlib ZipFile, it does not create the list of all archives when opening the file. This can save 100s of MB for zipfiles with a large number of members.