Work with RAR archive files through unrar library using ctypes.

python-unrar requires UnRAR library. You can download UnRAR library sources from:

http://www.rarlab.com/rar_add.htm

and compile (you may need to rename the makefile that you want to use according to your OS) and install it from there:

$ make lib
$ make install-lib

(latest tested sources: http://www.rarlab.com/rar/unrarsrc-5.2.6.tar.gz)

For Windows you can also download the already compiled library (http://www.rarlab.com/rar/UnRARDLL.exe).

If you prefer not to install the library, you should make it "findable" by adding the library file to a directory where libraries are searched (or change required environment variable).

As an alternative, you can also set UNRAR_LIB_PATH variable in your environment to the library path and python-unrar will try to load the UnRAR library from there.

You can build from source with:

$ python setup.py build

And then run a Python shell with unrar available:

$ PYTHONPATH=`pwd`/build/lib python

Or you could also directly add the unrar directory from this repo to your PYTHONPATH. In any case you will still need to make the unrar library available as mentioned above.

To install python-unrar:

$ pip install unrar

>>> from unrar import rarfile
>>> rar = rarfile.RarFile('sample.rar')
>>> rar.namelist()
[u'test_file.txt']
>>> rar.printdir()
File Name                                             Modified             Size
test_file.txt                                  2013-04-14 08:20:28           17
>>> rar.testrar()
>>> info = rar.infolist()[0]
>>> info.filename
u'test_file.txt'
>>> info.file_size
17L
>>> info.date_time
(2013L, 4L, 14L, 8L, 20L, 28L)
>>> rar.extractall()
>>> rar.read('test_file.txt')
'This is for test.'

Check full documentation in http://python-unrar.readthedocs.org.