Mike,
Your post is somewhat convoluted. I'll try my best. If you want to look through a war file for a particular file, that's fairly easy. A war file is just a zip file with some special attributes. If you'd like to do that, just search google for "read zip files java" and
you should get some good info. If that doesn't help, try to describe in more detail what you're trying to do and I'll try something else.