Today I learned…

PHP has a nice library to work with zip archives: ZipArchive. However, you cannot open zip files that are hosted on some website. First you have to download the zip file, and then you can open it using ZipArchive. An example:

$file = 'http://www.somesite.com/file.zip';
file_put_contents('file.zip', fopen($file, 'r'));
$zip = new ZipArchive();
if ($zip->open('file.zip') === true) {
    for ($i = 0; $i < $zip->numFiles; $i++) { 
         $stat = $zip->statIndex($i);
         if (strpos($stat['name'], 'partoffilename') !== false) {
             $fileContents = $zip->getFromIndex($i);
             // Do something here...
         }
    }
}

Also note something interesting here: if you don’t know the exact name of the file inside the zip archive that you want to open, you cannot use getFromName(), so you have to take another approach. In the above example, I iterate through the files in the archive using an index, checking every file for the part of the filename that I do know. When there’s a match, I can use the current index and getFromIndex() to open the file.