File Operations

ZIP Extractor

Extract ZIP files entirely in your browser and list, preview, and download their contents. Automatically detects and fixes garbled filenames from ZIPs created on Windows (Shift_JIS). Files are never sent to a server.

Tips for Extracting ZIP Files

  • Garbled filenames usually happen because the ZIP format itself, in many cases, doesn't store which character encoding a filename uses. A ZIP created on Japanese Windows is almost always Shift_JIS, while most others are UTF-8 — so if names look garbled, try switching the encoding dropdown to Shift_JIS.
  • Files whose UTF-8 encoding is explicitly flagged inside the ZIP itself never get the ? mark. Only filenames that had to be guessed carry that mark.
  • Click a folder row to expand or collapse it. Click a file row to preview text or image files right there.
  • In Chrome or Edge, choosing a folder with "Extract All" writes everything out directly while preserving the original folder structure. In other browsers, files are downloaded individually and the folder structure cannot be preserved (the path is instead baked into the filename with underscores).

Frequently Asked Questions

No. Extraction happens entirely inside your browser, and the file's contents are never sent to a server.

No, that isn't supported. An error will appear when the tool tries to read the file. Please remove the password first, then load the ZIP again.

In rare cases, the ZIP may have been created on an older Mac (Mac Roman encoding) or contain filenames in another language (Korean, Chinese, etc.). Try the other options in the dropdown. If nothing works, the tool or OS that created the ZIP may be using an unusual encoding.

Yes, but since everything is processed in the browser's memory, ZIP files over a few gigabytes may run slowly or fail depending on your device.
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Side Note — Why ZIP Filenames Get Garbled

When the ZIP format was born in 1989, there was no mechanism to record which character encoding a filename used. Each country and operating system simply wrote filenames using its own local encoding (Shift_JIS for Japanese, Windows-1252 for Western European languages, and so on), so garbled text when opening a ZIP on a different system was, in a sense, "working as designed."

To fix this, a mechanism called the "Language encoding flag (EFS)" was added starting around 2007. It uses a single bit in each ZIP entry's flags to explicitly mark "this filename is written in UTF-8." However, older ZIP tools — and some software that still doesn't set this flag — remain in use, so the garbled-filename problem between Windows and Mac still hasn't been fully solved even in the 2020s.

Note that this garbling is not damage to the data itself. The file's actual content (the bytes of the text or image) stays perfectly intact — only the filename, a piece of metadata, is being interpreted with the wrong rule. That's exactly why, once you know the correct encoding, a tool like this one can go back and restore the correct name.

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