Creating ZIP files on the fly

[void_function]

Hi.

Finding myself in a need to create ZIP files on the fly (with more than one file inside), simple googling revealed some classes and code examples on how to create a ZIP file, but dating back to 2001-2003 (Zend, Codewalkers, ...).

I was wondering, since PHP has ZIP library bundled as of version 4, is there any particular reason I should look into third party code except to see how ZIPs are created?

Does anyone have any experience in working with PHP "native" ZIP library? Thanks.

[cahva]

I have used both. Third party class that I use(d) is "TAR/GZIP/BZIP2/ZIP ARCHIVE CLASSES 2.1" by Devin Doucette which is very good:
[url]ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/fpc/phparchive/archive-2005-08-13.tar.gz[/url]

The PECL zip extension is also very good. Creating zip-file with couple of files is straight forward job:

<?php
$zip = new ZipArchive();
$filename = "./test.zip";

if ($zip->open($filename, ZIPARCHIVE::CREATE)!==TRUE) {
   exit("cannot open <$filename>\n");
}

// Add couple of files to zip-file
$zip->addFile("./test1.txt");
$zip->addFile("./test2.txt");
$zip->close();
?>

If you need to create other than zip files then use the archive class.