- Author
Francesc Alted i Abad
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Blosc (http://blosc.pytables.org) is a high performance compressor optimized for binary data. It has been designed to transmit data to the processor cache faster than the traditional, non-compressed, direct memory fetch approach via a memcpy() OS call.
Blosc works well for compressing numerical arrays that contains data with relatively low entropy, like sparse data, time series, grids with regular-spaced values, etc.
This is a Python package that wraps it.
Assuming that you have a C compiler installed, do:
$ python setup.py build_ext --inplace
This package supports Python 2.6, 2.7 and 3.1 or higher versions.
After compiling, you can quickly check that the package is sane by running:
$ PYTHONPATH=. (or "set PYTHONPATH=." on Win)
$ export PYTHONPATH=. (not needed on Win)
$ python blosc/toplevel.py (add -v for verbose mode)
Install it as a typical Python package:
$ python setup.py install
Please refer to docstrings. Start by the main package:
>>> import blosc
>>> help(blosc)
and ask for more docstrings in the referenced functions.
Also, some examples are available on python-blosc wiki page:
http://github.com/FrancescAlted/python-blosc/wiki
Discussion about this module is welcome in the Blosc list: