opening, reading, and writing files while agnostic to compression

 xphyle is a small Python library that makes it easy to open compressed
 files. Most importantly, xphyle will use the appropriate program
 (e.g. 'gzip') to compress/decompress a file if it is available on
 your system; this is almost always faster than using the corresponding
 Python library. xphyle also provides methods that simplify common file
 I/O operations.