ZIP Inspector
See exactly what's inside an archive before you extract it — and what's worth worrying about. Nothing is uploaded.
ZIP, DOCX, XLSX, JAR, APK, EPUB — all ZIP underneath
Read in your browser. The archive is never uploaded and nothing is extracted.
Reading an archive without opening it
A ZIP file keeps an index of its own contents — the central directory — in a block at the very end. Every entry lists a filename, its compressed and uncompressed size, a timestamp and a checksum. That index can be read on its own, which means you can see everything an archive contains without decompressing a single byte of it.
That is what this tool does. It reads the last part of the file, parses the directory, and shows you the manifest. Nothing is extracted and nothing is uploaded.
Three things worth checking before you extract
- Paths that escape the folder. An entry named
../../.ssh/authorized_keysis legal inside a ZIP. Extract it with a careless tool and it writes outside the directory you chose. This is called Zip Slip, and it has affected a long list of well-known software. - Compression bombs. A small archive that expands enormously — a few hundred kilobytes becoming many gigabytes — can fill a disk or exhaust memory. The ratio is visible in the directory without extracting anything, so it is easy to spot in advance.
- Executables you weren't expecting. A "document archive" containing
.exe,.scr,.bator.jsfiles is worth a second thought before you double-click anything.
Everything that's secretly a ZIP
Modern Office files are ZIP archives with a specific internal layout: a .docx holds word/document.xml, an .xlsx holds xl/workbook.xml. So are Java .jar files, Android .apk packages, EPUB books, and OpenDocument files. All of them open here, and looking inside a .docx is the simplest way to see what a document actually embeds — fonts, images, tracked changes, and anything else along for the ride.
What it can't tell you
Encrypted archives list their filenames in the clear but not their contents, so you will see the manifest and the entries will be flagged as encrypted. Split or multi-volume archives, and the RAR and 7z formats, use different container layouts entirely and are not read here. Timestamps come from whatever machine created the archive and are trivially forgeable, so treat them as a hint rather than evidence.