I was hoping for something more like this:<p>Extracting files from a remote ZIP archive (accessing files stored inside a zip file without downloading the whole zip archive)<p><a href="http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/remotezip.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/remotezip.aspx</a><p>And would like to see an implementation of a server-side means of generating arbitrary .zip files (just storing, without compression) dynamically... for automatic large download integrity verification. Places like <a href="http://put.io" rel="nofollow">http://put.io</a> could use something like that.
If you know that the input data is ASCII-encoded (or Unicode-encoded and capable of being ASCII-encoded), then using Python's cStringIO package (<a href="http://docs.python.org/library/stringio.html" rel="nofollow">http://docs.python.org/library/stringio.html</a>) is preferential for the significant speed boost.