Open .qgz files to edit file paths

Question

I have hundreds of QGIS projects that have been built over years and many different QGIS versions. Now I need to move them to another server and I want to be able to edit the project files to show the new file paths.

My issue is that I cannot unzip the qgz files because my PC Administrator has not given me access to an unzipping program. Normally, if the file I want to unzip is one recognised by WinZip, then I can right click and choose Extract. But right clicking a qgz file does not give me the Extract option.

My research indicates that earlier qgs files are easy to access, but my issue is about project files created by the 3.0 series of QGIS and the most recent project file version and my IT admin's distrust of my intentions.

How else can I open the project files to access the file paths in the qgs part?

Answer 1

To fix this manually, rename .qgz to .zip, extract zip, change paths, re-zip, rename .zip to .qgz.

Alternatively, I've hacked together a very basic and very minimally tested python script to do this (Python 3 only unless you modify it):

from fnmatch import filter
from io import BytesIO
from os import (walk, path, rename)
from zipfile import ZipFile, ZIP_DEFLATED


def main(in_dir, old_path, new_path, backup_suffix=None):
    for (dirpath, dirnames, filenames) in walk(in_dir):
        qgzs = filter(filenames, '*.qgz')
        for qgz in qgzs:
            qgz_path = path.join(dirpath, qgz)
            mem_qgz = BytesIO()
            with ZipFile(qgz_path, 'r') as in_qgz, ZipFile(mem_qgz, 'w', compression=ZIP_DEFLATED) as tmp_qgz:
                for f in in_qgz.infolist():
                    data = in_qgz.read(f.filename).decode('UTF-8')
                    if f.filename.endswith('.qgs'):
                        data = data.replace('source="{}'.format(old_path), 'source="{}'.format(new_path))
                    tmp_qgz.writestr(f.filename, data)

            if backup_suffix is not None:
                backup_suffix = backup_suffix if backup_suffix.startswith('.') else '.' + backup_suffix
                try:
                    rename(qgz_path, qgz_path + backup_suffix)
                except FileExistsError as err:
                    print('Unable to backup file, skipping {} ({})'.format(qgz_path, err))
                    continue

            with open(qgz_path, 'wb') as out_qgz:
                out_qgz.write(mem_qgz.getvalue())


if __name__ == '__main__':
    backup_suffix = '.orig'  # Don't overwrite orig .qgz (just in case...), append ".orig"
    in_dir = r'D:\Temp'

    old_path = 'D:\\'  # 2 trailing backslashes on Windows, 1 forward for Unix like paths
    new_path = r'C:\\'

    main(in_dir, old_path, new_path, backup_suffix)

Note: the path changes are a kludge and rely on a simple search and replace, but the zipped .qgs file is actually XML and really should be parsed as such.