Look inside a ZIP before you open it

An unexpected archive attachment is worth a look before extraction. List the entries and pull out just the files you actually need.

Tools used in this guide

The job

Someone sent a ZIP and you want to know what's in it — or you need one file out of a big archive without unpacking everything. The explorer lists names, sizes, and compression in a table.

Browse the archive

Choose the ZIP and the central directory is listed: every entry's path, unpacked size, and method. Download individual entries from the list instead of extracting the whole archive.

  • Stored (uncompressed) and raw-deflate entries can be extracted; other methods show as unsupported.
  • Folders appear as entries ending in / — they are just path markers.

Worked example

A 40 MB project archive reveals a folder tree plus a stray .DS_Store and an .exe nobody mentioned. You download the one report.pdf you needed and leave the rest inside.

What it won't open

ZIP64 archives over 4 GB, encrypted zips, and methods like bzip2 or LZMA are not supported for extraction — the entry list still shows so you can see what's inside before finding another tool. Split (multi-disk) archives, archives with more than 5,000 entries, and archives whose directory doesn't match its records are rejected with an error.

  • Limits: archives up to 200 MiB and 5,000 entries; each extracted file up to 200 MiB unpacked.
  • Extraction verifies each file's declared size and CRC — a mismatch is reported, not saved.
  • Extraction uses the browser's DecompressionStream — the archive never leaves the device.