How to unpackage and repackage a WAR file

Question

I have a WAR file. I would like to open it, edit an XML file, remove some jars and then re-package it.

I used WINRAR to open the WAR file and I removed some Jars and

Answer 1

Non programmatically, you can just open the archive using the 7zip UI to add/remove or extract/replace files without the structure changing. I didn't know it was a problem using other things until now :)

Answer 2

no need to that, tomcat naturally extract the war file into a folder of the same name. you simply modify the desired file inside that folder (including .xml configuration files), that's all. technically no need to restart tomcat after applying the modifications