If a .zip file contains all of the information of the original, just in less space, why does it have to be unzipped to access any of it?

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If a .zip file contains all of the information of the original, just in less space, why does it have to be unzipped to access any of it?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

A zip file doesn’t really contain the information, it contains instructions on how to recreate the information. The process of reconstructing the file is what unzipping is. Eg, a compressed book isn’t actually the book, it’s a list of all the words in the book plus the positions each of those words is in, because storing the locations of a word that repeats often takes up less space than storing a copy of that word each time.

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