PHP

Extract ZIP Files Without Preserving Directory Paths Using DiscardPaths

See more Zip Examples

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.

Chilkat2 PHP

<?php

use Chilkat2\Zip;

$zip = new Zip();

// Open an existing ZIP archive.
try {
    $zip->OpenZip('example.zip');
} catch (\Chilkat2\Exception $e) {
    echo $e->getMessage(), "\n";
    exit;
}

// Discard stored ZIP paths during extraction.
//
// When DiscardPaths = true, all files are extracted
// directly into the target directory without recreating
// the ZIP directory structure.
$zip->DiscardPaths = true;

// 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
//
$numFilesUnzipped = $zip->Unzip('c:/output');

if ($numFilesUnzipped < 0) {
    echo $zip->LastErrorText, "\n";
    exit;
}

echo 'Number of files extracted = ', $numFilesUnzipped, "\n";

$zip->CloseZip();

echo "Files extracted successfully.\n";