Using Python 3 to extract files from an encrypted archive with a password

Recently I needed to use python to extract the contents of a password-protected zip archive and I came across a few issues I thought would be good to document.

Python has a build in zipfile library that is really good at handling zip files, but unfortunately has a few limitations when it comes to encrypted zip files. This is how Python3 can be used to extract a file from an encrypted zip archive:


The first issue that I came across was some unclear documentation for the "open" method of zipfile in Python 3. The open method uses the "pwd" argument to pass the password for the file, but in Python 3 you need to convert this to bytes before calling open. Unfortunately, the library only seems to support CRC-32 based encryption  - meaning that the default linux zip encryption will work, but AES will not. I was also unable to get this to work with 7zip and WinZip.