ZIP to TAR
Nothing you choose here leaves your browser, and nothing is downloaded to make it work — not a library, not a compression module, nothing. Your browser already knows how to deflate and gzip; this page writes the TAR around it.
A tar is bigger, because a tar does not compress at all.
This is the step people take before compressing with something else, or because a tool insists on a tar. Expect the file to grow — usually to about the size of the contents, rounded up to 512-byte blocks. If you want it smaller, convert to tar.gz instead, which tars and then compresses.
How this works, and why nothing is fetched
A tar is a 512-byte header before each file and the bytes after it, so this page writes it outright — there is no compression involved and nothing to fetch. Reading the ZIP uses your browser's own decompressor, which it already has for web pages.
What it will not do
It will not open a RAR, and nothing ever writes one: RARLAB's licence forbids using their code to re-create the RAR algorithm, which is proprietary. That is a legal restriction and not a difficulty. It will not open a 7z, bzip2 or xz either — those need compressors your browser does not have, so supporting them would mean shipping one, which is the thing this page avoids. It says which of these it is looking at rather than just refusing.
It does not open password-protected archives, and it says so per file rather than failing silently. It reads plain ZIPs rather than ZIP64, so an archive over 4 GB or with more than 65,535 files is refused with that reason given.
Where to go next
- TAR to ZIP — the same conversion the other way
- ZIP to TAR.GZ — the Unix default, small and lossless
- JSON to CSV — for the data inside them