ZipFile get creation date

Question

I would like to get the creation date of a file inside zipped folder.

I know that without zip, this can be achieved with using os.path.getctime() function and last modified date of a file inside zipped folder can be extracted with ZipInfo.date_time. But ZipInfo does not seem to have a way to extract the creation date.

Also, I have tried on using ZipInfo to get the modified date as follows.

# zip_file is the .zip folder
# screenshot_filename is the file inside .zip
with ZipFile(zip_file, 'r') as my_zip:
    my_zip.getinfo(screenshot_filename)

And the ZipInfo object result does not contain any date_time information. Below is the example.

<ZipInfo filename='SCREEN CAP/SS.png' compress_type=deflate external_attr=0x20 file_size=555790 compress_size=504859>

So, did I do it wrongly or is there any better way to extract the creation date (or modified date if creation date is not possible) of a file inside zipped folder?

UPDATE:

I got the answer to get the last modified time/date_time from ZipInfo. Apparently, although date_time is not listed in the object, we can get it simply by accessing the attribute, i.e.

my_zip.getinfo(screenshot_filename).date_time

However, I am still looking for the answer for getting the creation date.

Answer 1

By default ZIP file stores only the modification date of a file (local time with 2 seconds precision, inherited from FAT file system limitations). Any additional metadata can be stored in extra field.

Note: Python does NOT decode extra field data, so you have to parse it yourself according to the documentation below!

The extra field consists of multiple data blocks which immediately follow each other. The following extra blocks can be used to store file creation or modification date in UTC and with more precision:

• NTFS (0x000a);
• UNIX (0x000d);
• Info-ZIP Macintosh (0x334d "M3");
• Unix Extended Timestamp (0x5455 "UT");
• Info-ZIP UNIX (0x5855 "UX").

(see Info-ZIP's extra field description for more info)

Note: As of Python 3.7 zipfile module reads file information only from ZIP's central directory file header, so you may have problems getting dates from some third-party extra blocks.
However, you could get extra field data from local file header yourself using header_offset field.

See this answer to set the creation date when you extract it.