java API to extract ZIP, RAR and TAR files

[laks ashok]

Is there any java API to extract ZIP, RAR and TAR files ?

[Maneesh Godbole]

Originally posted by laks ashok:
Is there any java API to extract ZIP, RAR and TAR files ?

What do you exactly mean by extract? From the command line? If yes, take a look at the "jar" command. Through your application? Take a look at the ZipInputStream.

[laks ashok]

I need to write a core java batch process to extract the contents from an archived file ( zip / rar and tar )

For Zip, I can use java.util.zip.

For RAR I found a pretty old version of Junrar
For TAR soemthing called javaTAR

I was wondering if there is a different option to achieve this.

[Ulf Dittmer]

I've used Apache Commons Compress for TAR. It also has (according to its documentation) a better ZIP than java.util.zip, and BZIP2.

[laks ashok]

For RAR2 formats I used unrar.jar.

Looks like there is no library available for unrar'ing RAR3 format.

If available, and I could use them through JNI , please do suggest.

[Rob Spoor]

The problem with RAR is that it's a closed format, so any library either needs to get a license or reverse engineer the format. The latter is (most likely) illegal so that's why there are so few libraries available.

As for using JNI, that would require a 3rd party library of which you can call functions to un-rar files. I doubt there is one though, as it has the same problems as Java libraries.

Perhaps you can use Runtime.exec or ProcessBuilder? In which case I suggest reading this article.