Unpack recursive

[tyeeman]

Can this extractor unpack say a zip within a rar which is then in another rar, etc.? Like multiple archives within others? I've made one using the command line but it's brute force. I just loop 4 times after each extraction which seems a waste of time. I'm sure you have the knowledge to do this as code! Just wondering if this crossed your mind?

[BazzaCuda]

Hi, thanks for getting in touch.

In theory, this is reasonably straight-forward to envisage.

Plan A

• Currently, when Extractor does the "Find Files" it doesn't recurse into the subfolders of the specified folder. However, it would be easy to add this option.
• As it's performing the initial "Extract" it needs to keep a list of the new folders that it creates when it's unpacking the archives.
• Once the extract is complete, it would then perform a "Find Files" in each of those new folders, making a list of all the candidate files and if it finds any, enable a "There's More" button.
• When the user clicks the button, the grid is repopulated using the list of newly found files.
• The user can then examine the list and again click "Extract".
• This is repeated until the "There's More" button is no longer available to the user.

In essence this is doing the same as your own loop and is under the user's control.
At each stage the user gets to see the results of trying to determine the password and whether the extract was successful or not.
This feedback is a vital.

Plan B takes Plan A one step further by automating the above steps:

• Add the recursion into subfolders option
• Have an option such that, once the initial list of files to extract has been processed, automatically continue to the next stage.
• Search the newly-extracted folders, find new candidate files and add them to the end of the current grid.
• When all the new files have been found and added to the grid, continue processing the list from the start of the new rows.
• Repeat this until "Find Files" finds no candidate files.
• This way the grid will always contain all the information about which files extracted successfully and which didn't.
• I would have to ensure that the files in the "_extracted" folders (where Extractor moves archives that have been successfully unpacked) are ignored or we'll have a never-ending loop.

Plan B sounds like it might actually be fun to implement. Particularly if I make the entire process recursive.
I'll have to completely restructure the existing code to accommodate all this.

I'm currently making some changes to my media player/ media manager (MMP) so I can't give you a timescale as yet, but I'm always looking for new programming projects and this does sound interesting.

As this is a major change (as far the existing code is concerned) I'll make this v2 when it's released, so you'll know when it's done.

Cheers,
Baz.