ZimReaderSharp - A .NET library designed for streamlined reading and handling of ZIM files.

ZimReaderSharp provides a streamlined interface to efficiently read and handle ZIM files. With support for multiple compression types—including BZip2, LZMA, and ZStd—this library prioritizes performance, loading only necessary data on-the-fly for rapid startup.

Installation

To incorporate ZimReaderSharp into your project, choose one of the following methods:

.NET CLI

dotnet add package ZimReaderSharp

NuGet Package Manager

Install-Package ZimReaderSharp

For detailed package information, visit ZimReaderSharp on NuGet.

Key Usages

The main class ZimFile offers an interface for accessing all the entries in a given ZIM file. You can either iterate over them, retrieve them by URL or by retrieve them by index.

Given a returned Entry, it has the following properties:

• Format: An object containing all the metadata for a given entry: Namespace, Revision, Url, Title, Parameter.

• Index: The index of the entry in the file.

• IsRedirect: If the user requested to not follow redirects, then this flag will be true and data will be null.

• Data: A byte[] containing the data of the entry

• Mime: A string representation of the mime type.

Sample usage

Here is an example to read all the HTML entries in a given ZIM file:

string filename = "wikipedia_en_all_nopic_2023-06.zim";

using var zimFile = new ZimFile(filename);

foreach (var (index, mime) in zimFile.IterateArticles()) {
    if (mime == "text/html") {
        var entry = zimFile.GetArticleByIndex(index, fFollowRedirect: false);
        if (entry.IsRedirect) continue;

        string html = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(entry.Data);
    }
}

Or, here is an example to get an entry by a URL:

string filename = "wikipedia_en_all_nopic_2023-06.zim";

using var zimFile = new ZimFile(filename);

var entry = zimFile.GetEntryByUrl('A', "some_url");
Console.WriteLine(entry.Format.Title);