How to read the contents of a .zip file with VBScript without actually extracting the files?

Question

I have a .zip file that starts with a parent directory. I need to read that dir from the file then search my HD to see if that dir name already exists. If it exists, I then

Answer 1

I'm not sure if it is possible to read the contents of a zip without extracting it.

If you are just trying to avoid a time consuming copy operation on the data you could try unzipping to a temp directory and then using a "move" function. Move is usually less time consuming than copy as it doesn't actually re-write the data on the disk. It just updates the file system to point at where the data is.

Answer 2

Assuming that you can use an external application, try downloading 7Zip and then have your script execute it with the -l switch. This should give you some output that you should be able to parse in some way.

Sample from the help file: 7z l archive.zip

Answer 3

You can use For Each on your objSource object, for example:

Dim objSA, objSource, item
Set objSA = CreateObject("Shell.Application")
Set objSource = objSA.NameSpace(pathToZipFile).Items ()
For Each item in objSource
    WScript.Echo item
Next 

Answer 4

Here is a similar question on SO.
How to list the contents of a .zip folder in c#?

I've used this library myself. It works well, http://dotnetzip.codeplex.com/, there is even a treeview example that appears to read the zip without extraction.

You will need the DLLs on the server, but I wouldn't say you have to install them. ;)