Read a zipped file Without Extracting?

[Howard Schwartz]

In ye old days of dos there were a few program that read text files within
a zip archive, `directly' without first extracting the unzipped file to a
temporary directory. I suppose they decompressed the file within ram.

Are there programs like this for windows?


Why do I care? I want to build an alternative to microsoft's chm or
help help files, used so often in even freeware applications, and requiring
IE to read.

I can decompress chm files, and build a table of contents and/or index
easily. But I would like to recompress the html files in come convenient
format like zip, so I need not keep some 20 odd separate html files on
disk to read.

 

[Don Boring]

Are there programs like this for windows?

Winzip does this easily.

DB

 

[Kurt]

Howard Schwartz wrote in

Are there programs like this for windows?

7zip, IZarc also IIRC

 

[Bob Adkins]

In ye old days of dos there were a few program that read text files within
a zip archive, `directly' without first extracting the unzipped file to a
temporary directory. I suppose they decompressed the file within ram.

Are there programs like this for windows?

IZArc.

You can even edit the files without unzipping.

 

[Little Girl]

Hey there,

In ye old days of dos there were a few program that read text files within
a zip archive, `directly' without first extracting the unzipped file to a
temporary directory. I suppose they decompressed the file within ram.

Are there programs like this for windows?

This one does what it says it does. Maybe it will work for you:

Zip Indexator
http://www.woundedmoon.org/win32/zipindexator12.html

<quotes from the page>
It searches all zip files in any directory and looks for information
about each file in numerous files, such as file_id.diz, license.txt,
readme.txt, install.txt, etc. You can add any filename to search, but
most I've ever seen are already listed.

After extracting all info for each file it creates "index.html"
wherever you want it and opens IE to view the results (second photo
below). You can use any browser to view the index; the program is set
to open IE.

Very attractive and exhaustive results for each zip are provided!

Why do I care? I want to build an alternative to microsoft's chm or
help help files, used so often in even freeware applications, and requiring
IE to read.

I can decompress chm files, and build a table of contents and/or index
easily. But I would like to recompress the html files in come convenient
format like zip, so I need not keep some 20 odd separate html files on
disk to read.

Well, you'll still require IE or another browser to read the results,
but the nice thing about this program is that it compiles all info
into one page.