Working with large remote files in cloud storage services like Amazon S3 can be challenging, often requiring complex code and careful object management.

import boto3

# Initialize S3 client
s3_client = boto3.client('s3')

with open('example_file.txt', 'w') as local_file:
    local_file.write("Hello, world!")

s3_client.upload_file('example_file.txt', 'khuyen-bucket', 'remote_file.txt')
s3_client.download_file('khuyen-bucket', 'remote_file.txt', 'example_file2.txt')

with open('example_file2.txt', 'r') as local_file:
    content = local_file.read()
    print(content)

# Hello, world!

smart_open addresses these issues by providing a single open() function that works across different storage systems and file formats.

from smart_open import open

with open('s3://khuyen-bucket/example_file.txt', 'w') as s3_file:
    s3_file.write("Hello, world!")


with open('s3://khuyen-bucket/example_file.txt', 'r') as s3_file:
    print(s3_file.read())

# Hello, world!

Notice how similar this is to working with local files. The open() function from smart_open handles all the complexities of S3 operations behind the scenes.

Another great feature of smart_open is its ability to handle compressed files transparently. Let’s say we have a gzipped file that we want to upload to S3 and then read from:

# Uploading a gzipped file
with open('example_file.txt.gz', 'r') as local_file:
    with open('s3://my-bucket/example_file.txt.gz', 'w') as s3_file:
        s3_file.write(local_file.read())

# Reading a gzipped file from S3
with open('s3://my-bucket/example_file.txt.gz', 'r') as s3_file:
    content = s3_file.read()
    print(content)

# Hello, world!

smart_open automatically handles the decompression when reading the gzipped file, making it seamless to work with compressed files in S3.

Other examples of URLs that smart_open accepts:

s3://my_bucket/my_key
s3://my_key:my_secret@my_bucket/my_key
s3://my_key:my_secret@my_server:my_port@my_bucket/my_key
gs://my_bucket/my_blob
azure://my_bucket/my_blob
hdfs:///path/file
hdfs://path/file
webhdfs://host:port/path/file
./local/path/file
~/local/path/file
local/path/file
./local/path/file.gz
file:///home/user/file
file:///home/user/file.bz2
[ssh|scp|sftp]://username@host//path/file
[ssh|scp|sftp]://username@host/path/file
[ssh|scp|sftp]://username:password@host/path/file

If you frequently work with remote files or cloud storage services, smart_open is definitely a tool worth adding to your Python toolkit. It can save you time, reduce complexity, and make your code more maintainable.

Link to smart_open.