Some facts and figures:
-* reads and writes :mod:`gzip` and :mod:`bz2` compressed archives.
+* reads and writes :mod:`gzip` and :mod:`bz2` compressed archives
+ if the respective modules are available.
* read/write support for the POSIX.1-1988 (ustar) format.
:attr:`TarFile.errorlevel`\ ``== 2``.
+The following constants are available at the module level:
+
+.. data:: ENCODING
+
+ The default character encoding: ``'utf-8'`` on Windows, the value returned by
+ :func:`sys.getfilesystemencoding` otherwise.
+
+
.. exception:: HeaderError
Is raised by :meth:`TarInfo.frombuf` if the buffer it gets is invalid.
The default format for creating archives. This is currently :const:`GNU_FORMAT`.
-The following variables are available on module level:
-
-
-.. data:: ENCODING
-
- The default character encoding i.e. the value from either
- :func:`sys.getfilesystemencoding` or :func:`sys.getdefaultencoding`.
-
-
.. seealso::
Module :mod:`zipfile`
Documentation of the :mod:`zipfile` standard module.
+ :ref:`archiving-operations`
+ Documentation of the higher-level archiving facilities provided by the
+ standard :mod:`shutil` module.
+
`GNU tar manual, Basic Tar Format <http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_node/Standard.html>`_
Documentation for tar archive files, including GNU tar extensions.