There's a recently posted article on the IBM developerWorks website today that's part four in a series they've been doing on what's different in PHP 5.2. This time, they focus on a handy little extension that can really work wonders - the Zip extension.

ZIP? It's about time! PHP just added ZIP features to PHP V5.2. Now they're now built-in. This article, Part 4 of a five-part "What's new in PHP V5.2" series, shows you how to make the most of this new feature by creating, editing, uploading and reading, and creating and downloading ZIP files. After reading this article, you will be well versed in the art of ZIP files using the latest ZIP PHP extension in PHP V5.2, so you can reduce bandwidth overhead or storage usage when handling large files with PHP.

The article is broken up into the four obvious sections:

• what is compression?
• what's in a zip file?
• making a zip archive with PHP
• uncompressing a zip archive with PHP

The last two come with their own code examples, using a simple text file to make the archive.