Pinch¶ ↑

Retrieve a file from inside a zip file, over the network!

Pinch makes it possible to download a specific file from within a ZIP file over HTTP/1.1 using nothing but the Ruby Standard Library (net/http and zlib)

Pinch is the Ruby implementation of an idea that my colleague Edward Patel had a while back.

The first version was written in Objective-C and we thought it would be cool if we could bring that functionality to Ruby :)

That version is available on github.com/epatel/pinch-objc/

I’ve tested Pinch on 1.9.3, 1.9.2, 1.8.7, MacRuby 0.10, JRuby 1.6.4 and rbx-head, YMMV.

The specs currently blows up on MagLev.

<img src=“https://secure.travis-ci.org/peterhellberg/pinch.png?branch=master” />

gem install pinch

require 'pinch'

data = Pinch.get 'http://peterhellberg.github.io/pinch/test.zip', 'data.json'

puts data

AWS S3 storage verifies url signature against HTTP verb, therefore requiring different pre-signed urls for HEAD and GET requests. Patch extends Pinch gem to accept hash or 2 urls, allowing to fetch items stored in zip archives on S3.

require 'pinch'
require 'right_aws'

s3 = RightAws::S3Generator.new('...','...')

bucket      = s3.bucket('my-bucket')
head_ticket = bucket.key('test.zip').head
get_ticket  = bucket.key('test.zip').get

data=Pinch.get({:head => head_url, :get => get_url},'data.json')

Copyright © 2011 Peter Hellberg and Edward Patel

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.