Extract a file from a ZIP string

Question

I have a BASE64 string of a zip file that contains one single XML file.

Any ideas on how I could get the contents of the XML file without having to deal with files o

Answer 1

If you are running on Linux and have administration of the system. You could mount a small ramdisk using tmpfs, the standard file_get / put and ZipArchive functions will then work, except it does not write to disk, it writes to memory. To have it permanently ready, the fstab is something like:

/media/ramdisk tmpfs nodev,nosuid,noexec,nodiratime,size=2M 0 0

Set your size and location accordingly so it suits you. Using php to mount a ramdisk and remove it after using it (if it even has the privileges) is probably less efficient than just writing to disk, unless you have a massive number of files to process in one go. Although this is not a pure php solution, nor is it portable. You will still need to remove the "files" after use, or have the OS clean up old files. They will of coarse not persist over reboots or remounts of the ramdisk.