Visual FoxPro

Extract ZIP Files Without Preserving Directory Paths Using DiscardPaths

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This example demonstrates how to use the DiscardPaths property to extract files from a ZIP archive without recreating the stored directory structure.

When DiscardPaths is set to _TRUE_, all extracted files are written directly into the target extraction directory, and any stored ZIP path information is ignored.

This is useful when:

• Flattening ZIP contents into a single directory
• Ignoring stored subdirectory structures during extraction
• Extracting only the files themselves without recreating folders

Suppose the ZIP archive contains:

docs/readme.txt
docs/manual.pdf
images/logo.png

Normally, extracting the ZIP would create:

output/docs/readme.txt
output/docs/manual.pdf
output/images/logo.png

But when DiscardPaths is set to _TRUE_, the extracted files become:

output/readme.txt
output/manual.pdf
output/logo.png

The stored ZIP directory paths are discarded during extraction.

Visual FoxPro

LOCAL lnSuccess
LOCAL loZip
LOCAL lnNumFilesUnzipped

lnSuccess = 0

lnSuccess = 0

loZip = CreateObject('Chilkat.Zip')

* Open an existing ZIP archive.
lnSuccess = loZip.OpenZip("example.zip")
IF (lnSuccess = 0) THEN
    ? loZip.LastErrorText
    RELEASE loZip
    CANCEL
ENDIF

* Discard stored ZIP paths during extraction.
* 
* When DiscardPaths = 1, all files are extracted
* directly into the target directory without recreating
* the ZIP directory structure.
loZip.DiscardPaths = 1

* Extract all files to the output directory.
* 
* Even if the ZIP contains:
* 
*     docs/readme.txt
*     docs/manual.pdf
*     images/logo.png
* 
* The extracted files become:
* 
*     c:/output/readme.txt
*     c:/output/manual.pdf
*     c:/output/logo.png
* 
lnNumFilesUnzipped = loZip.Unzip("c:/output")

IF (lnNumFilesUnzipped < 0) THEN
    ? loZip.LastErrorText
    RELEASE loZip
    CANCEL
ENDIF

? "Number of files extracted = " + STR(lnNumFilesUnzipped)

loZip.CloseZip()

? "Files extracted successfully."

RELEASE loZip