Question

I’m looking at a tutorial for creating an ePub file. It states that the zip that contains the ePub book must contain a textfile called mimetype that “must be first in the zip file, uncompressed”. The example he gives uses a commandline tool, I was wondering how I could do the same thing in PHP.

I assume it would be first in the zip file as long as its the first thing I add in the code, but how to add it to the zip uncompressed. Or am I misreading this?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You cannot do that with the native PHP ZipArchive class. But PEAR::Archive_Zip can – if you use the ARCHIVE_ZIP_PARAM_NO_COMPRESSION parameter when adding that specifc file.

A simpler solution would be to use a template. Create a stub zip file with your uncompressed “mimetype” entry (zip -0), then use that as temporary zip and afterwards just add new entries to it:

file_put_contents("epub.zip", base64_decode("UEsDBAoAAAAAAOmRAT1vYassFAAAABQAAAAIABwAbWltZXR5cGVVVAkAA5adVUyQVx5PdXgLAAEE6AMAAAToAwAAYXBwbGljYXRpb24vZXB1Yit6aXBQSwECHgMKAAAAAADpkQE9b2GrLBQAAAAUAAAACAAYAAAAAAAAAAAApIEAAAAAbWltZXR5cGVVVAUAA5adVUx1eAsAAQToAwAABOgDAABQSwUGAAAAAAEAAQBOAAAAVgAAAAAA"));
$zip = new ZipArchive();
$zip->open("epub.zip");

$zip->addFiles(...);

(untested though)