Fetch zip file from the web and decompress it in Go

Question

How can I fetch a zip archived file from the Web and decompress it in Go? It looks like archive/zip package provides a set of tools to parse the zipped file. However, in order to decompress the zipped file, I have to use zip.OpenReader, which takes the filename as string.

So how can I fetch the zipped file from the Web, and put it into the above function as string...? Or maybe do I have to first fetch the file and put it in one of the directories of my filesystem, and then read it?

Answer 1

It appears that in order to decompress a zip, you need to be able to seek to arbitrary locations. This means that unless you want to do something fancy, it either needs to be a local file or be completely in memory.

Assuming you have downloaded the zip and have it in a []byte, you want to do something like:

zipReader := zip.NewReader(bytes.NewReader(zipData), len(zipData))