Question 1

What is this actually for?

Accepted Answer

Reading or searching a folder of text or data files as one document instead of opening them one at a time - a directory of logs, a code export, a set of notes.

Question 2

Does it work on a folder of PDFs or Word documents?

Accepted Answer

No. Everything inside is decoded as plain text, so anything that is not text comes out as noise. Give it .txt, .md, .csv, source code or similar.

Question 3

Where does the work happen?

Accepted Answer

On the server, and this is the one tool here that is honest about needing to be. The archive is sent to an API on johnmcm.com, held in memory for the length of the request, combined, and streamed back. It is never written to disk and nothing is kept - but do not send anything confidential through it.

Question 4

What are the limits?

Accepted Answer

25 MB for the archive, at most 2,000 files inside it, and caps on how much it may expand to once unpacked.

Question 5

Can it build a ZIP as well?

Accepted Answer

No, it only takes them apart. The Archive Toolkit on this site creates ZIP files, and does it locally.

Free ZIP to text converter