Unzip a zip file using zlib

Question

I have an archive.zip which contains two crypted \".txt\" files. I would like to decompress the archive in order to retrieve those 2 files.

Here\'s what I\'ve done

Answer 1

zip is a file format that wraps header and trailer information around compressed data streams in order to represent a set of files and directories. The compressed data streams are almost always deflate data streams, which can in fact be generated and decoded by zlib. zlib also provides the crc32 function which can be used to generate and check the crc values in the zip wrapper information.

What zlib does not do by itself is decode and deconstruct the zip structure. You can either write your own code to do that using the specification (not very hard to do), or you can use the minizip routines in the contrib/minizip directory of the zlib distribution, which provides functions to open, access, and close zip files.

Answer 2

Zlib is not a library for handling .zip files. It supports decompressing zlib and gzip streams, both of which work on the level of a single stream of data, rather than an "archive" format like .zip.

You would need a different library (for one example, libzip; there are many others) to open and manipulate .zip archives.

Answer 3

As mentioned, zlib only handles compression, it doesn't archive. When you want to zip or unzip what you are doing is extracting files from an archive which happens to be in a zip format (there are other formats like rar, 7zip and so on)

If you want to create zips or unzip files you have to handle the zip format and minizip is a nice library, robust and has been there for quite a long time.

There is a contrib for minizip https://github.com/nmoinvaz/minizip with examples on how to use it. Is not that hard, and you can check the minizip.c and miniunz.c for code on how to use it. (Minizip uses zlib for the compression)

Also i ended up building a library that wraps minizip and adds a bunch of nice features to it and makes it easier to use and more object oriented. Lets you do things like zip entire folders, streams, vectors, etc. As well as doing everything entirely in memory.

Repo with examples here: https://github.com/sebastiandev/zipper

Beta pre-release: https://github.com/sebastiandev/zipper/releases/

Code looks something like:

Zipper zipper("ziptest.zip");
zipper.add("somefile.txt");
zipper.add("myFolder");
zipper.close();