Reading files that are compressed or located on a remote server

In case the file you need to read is compressed or located on a remote server, you don't have to download or unzip it unless you need the file for archiving or further processing. PDI allows you to read those files by using a Virtual File System URL.
The syntax for reading a particular file compressed as a zip file is zip:<compressed file>!/<file name>\, where <compressed file> is the full path for the zip file and <file name> is the name of the file to read, including the path inside the zip file.
If you want to read a file over HTTP, as File/Directory you just use the full URL preceded by http://.

Let's explain the options with an example. Suppose you have four text files, A.txt, B.txt, C.txt, and D.txt, and you zip them as samplefiles.zip inside the D:/SAMPLEFILES folder. The following table shows some possibilities: