Python: Open file in zip without temporarily extracting it

In theory, yes, it's just a matter of plugging things in. Zipfile can give you a file-like object for a file in a zip archive, and image.load will accept a file-like object. So something like this should work:

import zipfile
archive = zipfile.ZipFile('images.zip', 'r')
imgfile = archive.open('img_01.png')
try:
    image = pygame.image.load(imgfile, 'img_01.png')
finally:
    imgfile.close()

import io, pygame, zipfile
archive = zipfile.ZipFile('images.zip', 'r')

# read bytes from archive
img_data = archive.read('img_01.png')

# create a pygame-compatible file-like object from the bytes
bytes_io = io.BytesIO(img_data)

img = pygame.image.load(bytes_io)

I was trying to figure this out for myself just now and thought this might be useful for anyone who comes across this question in the future.

Vincent Povirk's answer won't work completely;

import zipfile
archive = zipfile.ZipFile('images.zip', 'r')
imgfile = archive.open('img_01.png')
...

You have to change it in:

import zipfile
archive = zipfile.ZipFile('images.zip', 'r')
imgdata = archive.read('img_01.png')
...

For details read the ZipFile docs here.