Learn Something New Every Day

Every day, people learn something new that adds some kind of value to their lives. I am going to try to post at one thing that I learn every day. I am a law school graduate, used to do some IT work, and just generally get out and around, so this shouldn’t be too difficult to do, right? We’ll see…
January 12

How To Unzip/Extract Large Zip Files Using PHP Without the PECL Zip Library

If you’re on Dreamhost and you don’t want to mess with installing a clean install of PHP and then installing PECL’s Zip library, this may help…

I was able to handle several large (i.e., hundreds of megabytes) files using the pclzip library discussed here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1923100/unpack-extract-zip-file-with-php-without-relying-on-any-extension

Note: you have to set the location for the script to create a temporary file.  Look for the line where “PCLZIP_TEMPORARY_DIR” is defined and include a file system location that is writable by the script.

Here’s the web address for the script: http://www.phpconcept.net/pclzip/

It was as easy as: 

require_once('pclzip.lib.php');

$archive = new PclZip('filename.zip');

if ($archive->extract() == 0) {
    echo "\n error while extract";
}