Hi - I feel like I'm about to ask a question for which the answer is already staring me in the face .... or so obvious that I should already know the answer :-) the DIZipWriter component is obviously for writing to and updating zip archives, but what do you use for the read operation? I want to implement the ability to: a) write from DIXml to PKZip compatible archives - should be no problem given DIZipwriter and the examples posted recently in these forums; b) write PKZip compatible archives for files that I just currently stream as uncompressed (no problems) c) to open files that are zipped in existing PKZip compatible archives - mostly text and xml encoded text files the examples posted recently regarding BZip2 lib are also very helpful Ralph - how can I implement in Delphi the ability to open and read streams created with DIZipWriter? thanks and regards, a. p.s. I've downloaded the trial vesion of DIZipWriter but I'm getting a version incompatability error between DIZipWriter and DIContainers. I've reviewed the examples and help files however, and can see that there are low-level methods in the ZipAPI to decompress and inflate data - is this the solution? no nice helper functions but putting together a method based on the API? thanks and regards, a. _______________________________________________ Delphi Inspiration mailing list yunqa@xxxxxxxxxxxxx //www.freelists.org/list/yunqa