Question

Are there any libraries for dealing with zip files as if they were simply directories? i.e. get a file listing, read a file, etc.

I prefer something in C, but any other language is fine.

Also, it would help if such a library could deal with other compression formats (rar, 7z, etc).

Answer 1

Python standard library to the rescue (slightly modified from here):

>>> import zipfile
>>> z = zipfile.ZipFile('/path/to/zip/file.zip', 'r')
>>> for filename in z.namelist():
...   print filename
...   bytes = z.read(filename)
...   print len(bytes)
file/1.dat
75776
file/2.dat
38912
file/3.dat
40960