ZIP Extractor

How to use the zip extractor

1. Choose a ZIP file — its contents are listed immediately.
2. Save an individual file, or extract everything.
3. Download the result.

About this tool

Lists what is inside a ZIP and extracts it. The archive is read in the page, so nothing is uploaded — worth caring about, because an archive someone sent you is exactly the kind of file whose contents you have not seen yet.

The listing alone is often all you need. It shows each entry, its size and how well the archive compressed, which answers "is the file I want actually in here" without extracting anything.

Extraction has a genuine limitation worth stating plainly. A web page cannot write a folder to your disk. Files therefore come back either one at a time, or repacked into a single archive with every path made safe — useful, but not the same as your operating system's own unzip, which should still be your first choice when you have one.

Entry paths are rewritten rather than trusted. A ZIP is just a list of names, and nothing stops one containing `../../.ssh/authorized_keys`; extracting that name writes outside the folder you chose. This is a real and repeatedly exploited bug class, so paths that climb out are flattened, and the page tells you when an archive contains one, since that is information about the archive worth having.

Two things are outside what this can do. Password-protected archives cannot be opened. Neither can 7z, RAR or TAR — they do the same job as ZIP but are entirely different formats, and a file being an archive does not make it a ZIP.

Common uses

• Checking what is inside an archive before trusting it.
• Pulling one file out of a large ZIP.
• Opening a ZIP on a machine with no archiver installed.

Frequently asked questions

Can it open RAR or 7z files?

No. Those are different formats that happen to do the same job. Only ZIP is supported.

Why can I not extract straight into a folder?

A web page has no permission to write folders to your disk. Files are saved individually, or repacked into one archive with safe paths.

What does the warning about entry paths mean?

An entry named something like ../../file would write outside the folder you chose. Those names are rewritten here, and the warning tells you the archive contained one — which is worth knowing about its source.