First steps

Download and extraction

The most simple way to get 7-Zip-JBinding to work is to download a pre-compiled binary package for your operating system here. All provided packages are Zip-compressed and you will need an extraction utility to expand them. For windows users securing a copy of 7-Zip is highly recommended. Linux and Mac OS X users may use the corresponding command line tool p7Zip or build-in Zip extractors.

Get from maven central

There are two dependencies need to be added to the pom.xml file. 7-Zip-JBinding library jar and the platform dependend (native) jar.

Note: 7-Zip-JBinding library doesn't declare maven depenency to any platform jars. So you always need two <dependency> tags.

The simplest way to use 7-Zip-JBinding is to use the platform autodetection with the "all-platform" native package. (The down side is the relatively big size of the "all-platform" jar though):

<dependency>
    <groupId>net.sf.sevenzipjbinding</groupId>
    <artifactId>sevenzipjbinding</artifactId>
    <version>16.02-2.01</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>net.sf.sevenzipjbinding</groupId>
    <artifactId>sevenzipjbinding-all-platforms</artifactId>
    <version>16.02-2.01</version>
</dependency>

Alternatively the proper platform jar artifact can be manually selected or selected using platform dependend maven profiles. Here is a list of all available platform artifactIds:

sevenzipjbinding-all-linux
sevenzipjbinding-all-mac
sevenzipjbinding-all-platforms
sevenzipjbinding-all-windows
sevenzipjbinding-linux-amd64
sevenzipjbinding-linux-arm
sevenzipjbinding-linux-i386
sevenzipjbinding-mac-i386
sevenzipjbinding-mac-x86_64
sevenzipjbinding-windows-amd64
sevenzipjbinding-windows-x86

Run an example

To use the 7-Zip-JBinding library you will need two JAR-files from lib folder of the distribution in your classpath:

sevenzipjbinding.jar - java part of 7-Zip-JBinding. (JavaDoc)
sevenzip-jbinding-‹OS›.jar - native libraries for the target operating system ‹OS›

Here is a simple test program that can be used for checking all 7-Zip-JBinding requirements:

import net.sf.sevenzipjbinding.SevenZip;
import net.sf.sevenzipjbinding.SevenZipNativeInitializationException;

public class SevenZipJBindingInitCheck {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        try {
            SevenZip.initSevenZipFromPlatformJAR();
            System.out.println("7-Zip-JBinding library was initialized");
        } catch (SevenZipNativeInitializationException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

download java code

To run this program correctly you will need to add two 7-Zip-JBinding JAR-files to the classpath. On Linux it could be done as following:

$ java -cp ‹path-to-lib›/sevenzipjbinding.jar:             \  
           ‹path-to-lib›/sevenzipjbinding-Linux-i686.jar:. \ 
       SevenZipJBindingInitCheck

Windows users can do the same with (written in a single line)

C:\Test> java -cp ‹path-to-lib›\sevenzipjbinding.jar;           \  
                  ‹path-to-lib›\sevenzipjbinding-Windows-x86.jar;. \ 
              SevenZipJBindingInitCheck

If the message

7-Zip-JBinding library was initialized

shows up than 7-Zip-JBinding is working properly and is ready to use.

Working with existing archives

Before you can do anything with an archive, you have to open it. In order to do this you will need to call one of the corresponding static methods SevenZip.openInArchive(...). The single mandatory parameter is "inStream" - an implementation of the IInStream interface.

In case you want to open an archive file from the file system 7-Zip-JBinding provides a standard implementation of the IInStream interface: RandomAccessFileInStream. As the name says, this takes an instance of RandomAccessFile and uses it to provide an implementation of the IInStream.

Here is a simple example of how to open an archive from the file system:

public void openArchive(String archiveFilename) 
        throws SevenZipException, FileNotFoundException {

    randomAccessFile = new RandomAccessFile(archiveFilename, "r");

    inArchive = SevenZip.openInArchive(null, // Choose format automatically
            new RandomAccessFileInStream(randomAccessFile));
}

download java code

The opened archive can now be used for browsing or extraction operations. The last method called on archive should always be IInArchive.close(). It will close the archive and free system resources. The last, but not least, step is to close the random access file 'randomAccessFile' using close() method.

Here is a complete program to print count of items in an archive of any supported format:

import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.RandomAccessFile;

import net.sf.sevenzipjbinding.IInArchive;
import net.sf.sevenzipjbinding.SevenZip;
import net.sf.sevenzipjbinding.SevenZipException;
import net.sf.sevenzipjbinding.impl.RandomAccessFileInStream;

public class PrintCountOfItems {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        if (args.length == 0) {
            System.out.println("Usage: java PrintCountOfItems <archive-name>");
            return;
        }
        String archiveFilename = args[0];

        RandomAccessFile randomAccessFile = null;
        IInArchive inArchive = null;
        try {
            randomAccessFile = new RandomAccessFile(archiveFilename, "r");
            inArchive = SevenZip.openInArchive(null, // autodetect archive type
                    new RandomAccessFileInStream(randomAccessFile));

            System.out.println("Count of items in archive: " 
                    + inArchive.getNumberOfItems());

        } catch (Exception e) {
            System.err.println("Error occurs: " + e);
        } finally {
            if (inArchive != null) {
                try {
                    inArchive.close();
                } catch (SevenZipException e) {
                    System.err.println("Error closing archive: " + e);
                }
            }
            if (randomAccessFile != null) {
                try {
                    randomAccessFile.close();
                } catch (IOException e) {
                    System.err.println("Error closing file: " + e);
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

download java code

If you run this program with

C:\Test> java -cp ‹path-to-lib›\sevenzipjbinding.jar;           \  
                  ‹path-to-lib›\sevenzipjbinding-Windows-x86.jar;. \ 
              PrintCountOfItems my-test-archive.zip

you should get something like this:

Count of items in archive: 4

Continue with extraction code snippets to get more examples.

Creating new archives

In order to create a new archive you need to call the corresponding open method of the SevenZip class first. Here you should choose one of the archive format specific methods (like SevenZip.openOutArchiveZip(...) for Zip) or use the archive format independent method SevenZip.openOutArchive(...). Lets use Zip-specific method and see how a very simple Zip archive with a single item (archived file) containing a text message can be created.

There are 4 following steps involved:

Implement IOutCreateCallback<IOutItemCallbackZip> interface describing the archive item
Open new out-archive
Optionally configure the new archive (e.g. setting compression level)
Call createArchive(...) method to create the new archive

(Note: the following example snippet lacks the proper error handling and shouldn't be used as a template for production code. See compression/update code snippets for complete examples)

Here is the complete class:

import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.RandomAccessFile;
import java.util.Date;

import net.sf.sevenzipjbinding.IOutCreateArchiveZip;
import net.sf.sevenzipjbinding.IOutCreateCallback;
import net.sf.sevenzipjbinding.IOutItemZip;
import net.sf.sevenzipjbinding.ISequentialInStream;
import net.sf.sevenzipjbinding.SevenZip;
import net.sf.sevenzipjbinding.SevenZipException;
import net.sf.sevenzipjbinding.impl.OutItemFactory;
import net.sf.sevenzipjbinding.impl.RandomAccessFileOutStream;
import net.sf.sevenzipjbinding.util.ByteArrayStream;

public class CompressMessage {
    /**
     * The callback provides information about archive items
     */
    static class MyCreateCallback implements IOutCreateCallback<IOutItemZip> {
        private final byte[] bytesToCompress;

        private MyCreateCallback(byte[] bytesToCompress) {
            this.bytesToCompress = bytesToCompress;
        }

        public void setOperationResult(boolean operationResultOk) {
            // called for each archive item
        }

        public void setTotal(long total) {
            // Track operation progress here
        }

        public void setCompleted(long complete) {
            // Track operation progress here
        }

        public IOutItemZip getItemInformation(int index,
                OutItemFactory<IOutItemZip> outItemFactory) {
            IOutItemZip outItem = outItemFactory.createOutItem();

            outItem.setDataSize((long) bytesToCompress.length);

            // Set name of the file in the archive
            outItem.setPropertyPath("message.txt");
            outItem.setPropertyCreationTime(new Date());

            // To get u+rw permissions on linux, if extracting with "unzip"
            // outItem.setPropertyAttributes(Integer.valueOf(0x81808000));

            return outItem;
        }

        public ISequentialInStream getStream(int index) {
            return new ByteArrayStream(bytesToCompress, true);
        }
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        if (args.length != 2) {
            System.out.println("Usage: java CompressMessage <archive> <msg>");
            return;
        }

        final byte[] bytesToCompress = args[1].getBytes();

        RandomAccessFile raf = null;
        IOutCreateArchiveZip outArchive = null;
        try {
            raf = new RandomAccessFile(args[0], "rw");

            outArchive = SevenZip.openOutArchiveZip();
            outArchive.setLevel(5);
            outArchive.createArchive(new RandomAccessFileOutStream(raf), 1, 
                    new MyCreateCallback(bytesToCompress));

            System.out.println("Compression operation succeeded");
        } catch (SevenZipException e) {
            System.err.println("7-Zip-JBinding-Error:");
            // Extended stack trace prints more information
            e.printStackTraceExtended();
        } catch (Exception e) {
            System.err.println("Error occurs: " + e);
        } finally {
            if (outArchive != null) {
                try {
                    outArchive.close();
                } catch (IOException e) {
                    System.err.println("Error closing archive: " + e);
                }
            }
            if (raf != null) {
                try {
                    raf.close();
                } catch (IOException e) {
                    System.err.println("Error closing file: " + e);
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

download java code

If you run this program with

C:\Test> java -cp ‹path-to-lib›\sevenzipjbinding.jar;           \ 
                  ‹path-to-lib›\sevenzipjbinding-Windows-x86.jar;. \ 
              CompressMessage compressed_message.zip HelloWorld

you will get the output

Compression operation succeeded

Also the archive compressed_message.zip should be created. It contains single compressed file "message.txt" with the message "HelloWorld".

C:\Test> 7z l compressed_message.zip
Listing archive: compressed_message.zip
--
Path = compressed_message.zip
Type = zip
Physical Size = 135
   Date      Time    Attr         Size   Compressed  Name
------------------- ----- ------------ ------------  ------------------------
2015-09-09 08:56:42 .....           15           15  message.txt
------------------- ----- ------------ ------------  ------------------------
                                    15           15  1 files, 0 folders

C:\Test> 7z x compressed_message.zip
Processing archive: compressed_message.zip
Extracting  message.txt
Everything is Ok
Size:       15
Compressed: 135

C:\Test> type message.txt
HelloWorld

Continue with compression/update code snippets to get more examples.