End of Central Directory record could not be found

Question

I am downloading a zip file using c# program and I get the error

at System.IO.Compression.ZipArchive.ReadEndOfCentralDirectory()
   at System.IO.Compression         


        

Answer 1

I encountered this same problem. There are many types of compression, .zip being only one of the types. Look and make sure that you aren't trying to 'unzip' a .rar or similar file.

Answer 2

I just came across this thread when I had the same error from a PowerShell script calling the Net.WebClient DownloadFile method.

In my case, the problem was that the web server was unable to provide the requested zip file, and instead provided an HTML page with an error message in it, which obviously could not be unzipped.

So instead, I created an exception handler to extract and present the "real" error message.

Answer 3

Write down the stream to a file then inspect it with a (hex) editor.
I got the same message in Visual Studio when downloading nupkg from nuget.org. It was because nuget.org was blacklisted by the firewall. So instead of the pkg I got a html error page which (of course) cannot be unzipped.

Answer 4

From your old question you deleted.

I get System.IO.InvalidDataException: End of Central Directory record could not be found.

This most likely means whatever file you are passing in is malformed and the Zip is failing. Since you already have the file outfile on the hard drive I would recommend trying to open that file with with windows built in zip extractor and see if it works. If it fails the problem is not with your unzipping code but with the data the server is sending to you.