Reading rar file without extracting it

[Shiva Kumar V]

Hi ,

I want to know how to read the archived files with rar extension.
I have about 10000 text files. I dont want to extract the file as the text files are very big and i am using winrar 2.9 version.
I want just to read the contents of the text file without extracting rar file.

Please help me.......... Waiting for some response....

[Tim McGuire]

Shiva Kumar V wrote:Hi ,
I want just to read the contents of the text file without extracting rar file.

I hope you mean you want to look at the list of files contained in the rar file. RARoScope is a library that can do this. If you really want to read the contents of the compressed text files, you have to uncompress (=extract) them to read them!

[Shiva Kumar V]

Thanks Tim..... But i want to read the file without extracting.

[Amit Ghorpade]

"Shiva Kumar V " welcome to Javaranch
please check your private messages for an important administrative matter. You can check them by clicking the My Private Messages link above.

[Mike Simmons]

Shiva Kumar V wrote:Thanks Tim..... But i want to read the file without extracting.

Sure, no problem:

InputStream in = new FileInputStream(file);
for (int b; (b = in.read()) != -1; )
  System.out.println("found byte: " + b);
in.close();

There you go - you've read every byte in the file, and you haven't extracted anything.

If you wanted something else, perhaps you could share with us how "reading" a file would be different from "extracting" the file. I can think of several possible interpretations (such as the one I just gave), but I don't want to play guessing games here. Tim has already made a reasonable attempt at guessing what you meant, and you replied by repeating exactly what you'd said the first time, with no additional detail. That's not really helpful here. People are trying to help you, but you need to try to better explain what it is that you need. Good luck.

[Maneesh Godbole]

Check out ZipInputStream andGZipInputStream.

[Mike Simmons]

(But don't anyone tell him that those classes extract files from compressed formats, because that would violate the requirements.) ;)