Reading ZIP stream

[phphead]

I am working with our Java team to pass a stream of data from a Java client app to my PHP page. We were doing this in XML and everything worked great, but now they are sending me a ZIP datastream. All functions I've found for reading ZIP files in PHP require a file, which I don't have. I take the ZIP datastream sent to me and throw it in a variable. How do I read or "unzip" this? Is it even possible? I've already tried creating a ZIP file on the fly using fopen and the extension ".zip" and stuffing the ZIP data into it but it doesn't work, says it is an invalid archive. And I cannot create a real ZIP file on the fly because the data I'm receiving is already zipped.

Here is the code I use to accept the datastream:

$variable = file_get_contents("php://input");

how can I unzip the data in $variable?

[dagon]

i would think file_put_contents then either php or server os zip functions should work fine. If this is not can you show what code your using.

[phphead]

I just want to give an update on this. I was able to use the gzip functions in PHP to achieve what I wanted. In order for this to work howerver, I needed the Java team to change the way they zipped the data before streaming. The stream needs to be compressed with the Java class java.util.zip.Deflater. We tried a couple dif ones and this was the only one that worked for us. Here is the working code that accepts the zip stream and uncompresses it.

 
 $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA = file_get_contents("php://input");
  $data_in=gzuncompress($HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA);