[c#] How to read data from a zip file without having to unzip the entire file

Is there anyway in .Net (C#) to extract data from a zip file without decompressing the complete file?

Simply I possibly want to extract data (file) from the start of a zip file, obviously this depends if the compression algorithm compress the file in a deterministic order.

Zip files have a table of contents. Every zip utility should have the ability to query just the TOC. Or you can use a command line program like 7zip -t to print the table of contents and redirect it to a text file.

Here is how a UTF8 text file can be read from a zip archive into a string variable (.NET Framework 4.5 and up):

string zipFileFullPath = "{{TypeYourZipFileFullPathHere}}";
string targetFileName = "{{TypeYourTargetFileNameHere}}";
string text = new string(
            (new System.IO.StreamReader(
             System.IO.Compression.ZipFile.OpenRead(zipFileFullPath)
             .Entries.Where(x => x.Name.Equals(targetFileName,
                                          StringComparison.InvariantCulture))
             .FirstOrDefault()
             .Open(), Encoding.UTF8)
             .ReadToEnd())
             .ToArray());

In such case you will need to parse zip local header entries. Each file, stored in zip file, has preceding Local File Header entry, which (normally) contains enough information for decompression, Generally, you can make simple parsing of such entries in stream, select needed file, copy header + compressed file data to other file, and call unzip on that part (if you don't want to deal with the whole Zip decompression code or library).

Something like this will list and extract the files one by one, if you want to use SharpZipLib:

var zip = new ZipInputStream(File.OpenRead(@"C:\Users\Javi\Desktop\myzip.zip"));
var filestream = new FileStream(@"C:\Users\Javi\Desktop\myzip.zip", FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read);
ZipFile zipfile = new ZipFile(filestream);
ZipEntry item;
while ((item = zip.GetNextEntry()) != null)
{
     Console.WriteLine(item.Name);
     using (StreamReader s = new StreamReader(zipfile.GetInputStream(item)))
     {
      // stream with the file
          Console.WriteLine(s.ReadToEnd());
     }
 }

Based on this example: content inside zip file

With .Net Framework 4.5 (using ZipArchive):

using (ZipArchive zip = ZipFile.Open(zipfile, ZipArchiveMode.Read))
    foreach (ZipArchiveEntry entry in zip.Entries)
        if(entry.Name == "myfile")
            entry.ExtractToFile("myfile");

Find "myfile" in zipfile and extract it.