RAR: creating a store archive

The other day I told you how to get a list of files that contains a rar-archive without using third-party extensions or libraries. In one of the comments flashed the thought that, in principle, despite the closeness of the RAR algorithm, you can manually create an archive without compression. After sitting one evening over the code, I present to your attention a class for creating stored-RAR archives.

I will not describe the format again, it is described quite well here or in my previous article. This time, we will simply consider what the library can do and how we will have ways to expand it in the future.

Work example

1. $ rar = new store_rar ; # create an instance of the class
2. $ rar -> create ( "archive.rar" ) ; # create archive
3. $ rar -> addFile ( "a.txt" ) ; # write a.txt file to it
4. $ rar -> addDirectory ( "b / c" ) ; # create archive directory "b" with subdirectory "c"
5. $ rar -> addFile ( "d / e.txt" ) ; # create the "d" directory and write e.txt into it
6. $ rar -> close ( ) ; # close archive

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You can get the code with comments on GitHub .

And in fact?

Let's see what this class is capable of:

• Create “empty” rar-archives :)
• Create any nesting of directories with one call to addDirectory ;
• When creating an existing directory in the archive, a new directory will not be created;
• Write the file to a subdirectory without first creating it.

What is worth keeping in mind:

• If the “archived” file has already been added to the archive, there will be two (and so on) files with the same name in the archive;
• The class does not support unicode-characters (which, I note, is in 3.x version of RAR);
• There are no functions to rename, delete, move files inside the archive, add files to the archive, unzip files;
• No support for multitome archives.

Why do you need this library:

• To quickly archive a certain amount of files and then send them to the user in the form of a single archive;
• As proof of the fact that you can archive in rar without rar.dll :)

What I would like to do in the future:

• Support for file operations inside the archive;
• Support for unicode names;
• Breakdown of archives in volumes;
• “Archiving” with a password is not sure what is possible.