Unzip a file online.

A ZIP someone sends you is often one file you want and forty you do not. The tool above lists everything in the archive with its packed and unpacked size and gives each file its own download button, so a single logo or one spreadsheet comes out without writing the rest to disk. The archive is read where it already sits, nothing is uploaded, and the page keeps working after you disconnect from the network.

Choosing a file reads only the archive's central directory, which is the small index at the end of every ZIP recording what the archive holds. That index is a few kilobytes whether the file is 2MB or 2GB, which is why the list appears straight away on a large archive. Compressed data is read and expanded only when you click one specific file. The two size columns are worth comparing if you are curious about what file compression is, since text and source code often pack down to a tenth of their original size while photographs and video barely move at all.

Two kinds of entry will not open. Password-protected files are listed and marked as locked, because reading them needs the password and this page never asks for one. Files compressed with something other than deflate, which in practice means archives written with 7-Zip's LZMA setting or with bzip2, are listed but cannot be expanded by a browser. There is also a 100MB ceiling on a single unpacked file, high enough for anything real and low enough that an archive claiming to hold far more than it does cannot lock up the tab. That ceiling applies to one file at a time, so the rest of the list keeps working.

A file usually needs somewhere to go once it is out of the archive. If the bundle is something you need to send rather than read, you can host a ZIP and the whole thing travels as one link instead of an attachment that gets stripped in transit. A spreadsheet you pulled out is readable straight away if you view a CSV online, under the same no-upload rule as this page. Hosting is free for ten active files on the free plan, and the rest of the free developer tools work the same way, in the browser with nothing logged.