Have you ever dealt with compressed files and archives in your .NET applications? If so, you might have come across SharpCompress, a versatile and powerful compression library that caters to various formats. This blog post will delve into the features of SharpCompress, its advantages, and how to use it in your projects. Let’s get started!

SharpCompress: A Brief Overview

SharpCompress is an open-source compression library for .NET, which provides developers with the ability to handle various compressed file formats and archive types. Developed by Adam Hathcock and hosted on GitHub (https://github.com/adamhathcock/sharpcompress), the library is written entirely in C# and aims to be an easy-to-use, feature-rich, and highly performant alternative to other compression libraries available for the .NET platform.

Supported Formats and Features

SharpCompress supports an extensive list of compression formats and archive types, including:

1. ZIP (including Deflate, LZMA, PPMd, BZip2, and Store compression methods)
2. 7-Zip (including LZMA, LZMA2, PPMd, and BZip2 compression methods)
3. GZip
4. BZip2
5. Tar
6. RAR (including RAR5)
7. LZip
8. XZ

Some of the standout features of SharpCompress include:

1. Forward-only (non-seekable) reading of archives, allowing efficient processing of large archives in a streaming manner
2. Archive creation and modification capabilities, including adding, updating, and deleting entries
3. Extraction of entries from archives to streams, byte arrays, or directly to the file system
4. Multi-threaded compression and decompression
5. File and directory abstraction, which allows working with local files or other sources like cloud storage

Getting Started with SharpCompress

To use SharpCompress in your project, you’ll first need to install the library using NuGet. Open the Package Manager Console in Visual Studio and run the following command:

Install-Package SharpCompress

Once installed, you can start using SharpCompress in your .NET applications by adding the appropriate namespace:

using SharpCompress.Archives;
using SharpCompress.Common;
using SharpCompress.Readers;
using SharpCompress.Writers;

Basic Usage Examples

To give you an idea of how simple it is to use SharpCompress, here are a couple of basic examples:

1. Extracting all files from a ZIP archive:

using (var archive = ZipArchive.Open("path/to/your/archive.zip"))
{
    foreach (var entry in archive.Entries.Where(entry => !entry.IsDirectory))
    {
        entry.WriteToDirectory("path/to/output/directory", new ExtractionOptions { ExtractFullPath = true, Overwrite = true });
    }
}

2. Creating a new ZIP archive with compression:

using (var archive = ZipArchive.Create())
{
    archive.AddEntry("file1.txt", "path/to/file1.txt", CompressionType.Deflate);
    archive.AddEntry("file2.txt", "path/to/file2.txt", CompressionType.Deflate);
    archive.SaveTo("path/to/your/new/archive.zip", CompressionType.Deflate);
}

SharpCompress can be an invaluable tool if you are working with compression and archiving tasks in .NET applications.