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?

Question

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?

In: 1276

Answer 1

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.