ZIP file extractor

See inside before you extract

The most useful thing about opening an archive online is often not the extracting at all — it is finding out what is in the thing somebody sent you. The contents are listed as soon as the file is read: every entry, its real size, its compressed size and the date it was added. You can then take out only the one file you needed.

Nothing is uploaded

The archive is read in your browser and stays there. That matters more here than almost anywhere else, because an archive somebody has sent you is exactly the kind of thing you should not be posting to a stranger's server to look at.

It also means it works with no connection once the page has loaded.

Text files can be previewed

Text, code, CSV, JSON, XML and similar entries can be read straight in the page without downloading them first, which is usually all you wanted when you were checking whether an archive holds the right thing.

What it can and cannot open

• Standard zip archives, including ones with folders inside them. Yes.
• Password-protected zips. No — and it will say so plainly rather than failing with something unhelpful. Encrypted archives need a desktop tool.
• RAR, 7z, tar.gz and other formats. No. Those are different formats that happen to do a similar job; this reads zip.
• Damaged archives. It will tell you the file could not be read as a zip rather than producing rubbish.

A note on what is inside archives

Treat an archive from someone you do not know the way you would treat any other unexpected attachment. Listing its contents here is safe — nothing is executed — but that is not a judgement about whether the files themselves are safe once you have them on your machine.

Related tools

To make an archive rather than open one, see the ZIP file creator.