For some reason I cannot get cPickle.load to work on the file-type object returned by ZipFile.open(). If I call read() on the file-type object returned by ZipFile.open() I can use cPickle.loads though.

Example ....

import zipfile
import cPickle

# the data we want to store
some_data = {1: 'one', 2: 'two', 3: 'three'}

#
# create a zipped pickle file
#
zf = zipfile.ZipFile('zipped_pickle.zip', 'w', zipfile.ZIP_DEFLATED)
zf.writestr('data.pkl', cPickle.dumps(some_data))
zf.close()

#
# cPickle.loads works
#
zf = zipfile.ZipFile('zipped_pickle.zip', 'r')
sd1 = cPickle.loads(zf.open('data.pkl').read())
zf.close()

#
# cPickle.load doesn't work
#
zf = zipfile.ZipFile('zipped_pickle.zip', 'r')
sd2 = cPickle.load(zf.open('data.pkl'))
zf.close()

Note: I don't want to zip just the pickle file but many files of other types. This is just an example.