title: Interface (wrapper) to SZIP from Python
body: <p>I'm looking for a (reliable) interface to <strong>SZIP</strong> (de)compressing library from Python.  I found <a href="https://pypi.org/project/ricecomp-cfitsio/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">ricecomp-cfitsio</a> and tried to use it, but I have no experience with the SZIP library or the Rice algorithm, and this package is far from being well documented.  So I end up with some arguments to the provided API for the decompression routines that work for some input data but not for others (and I get an exception "<em>Failure to decompress data</em>", but don't know why -- in fact, I get a <code>TypeError</code> exception "<em>Can only concatenate str (not "bytes") to str</em>" when the former exception is raised, surely because I'm using this package with Python 3).</p>
  
  <p>I would like to find a package that provides an API that calls directly the <strong>SZIP</strong> library.  I understand this can be done through a <strong>Cython</strong> module, and I'm trying hard to get it, but I have no experience at all with that, and I'm not getting as far as I need.</p>