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

If I have the string “0000000000” in a file. The program doing the compression may replace this with a shorthand like “0x10″*. No information was lost, we still know what the original data was. However, *other programs* don’t understand the shorthand the compression algorithm used. They don’t know “0x10” is supposed to mean “0000000000”.

*Obviously, the computer wouldn’t compress it to something human readable like this, but this is just an example.