Here’s the example:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use warnings;
use bytes;
use Encode::Detect;

sub normalize_to_utf8 {
return decode(”Detect”, shift);
}

$fname = “any_filename_from_archive_as_it_comes”;
$fname = normalize_to_utf8($fname);

# now $file’s encoding detected and converted to UTF8
# ready to be used

Hope this helps.

If archive was done on Windows u use -O option some thing like:

unzip -O sjis yourarchive.zip

-I option is used if you archived it on Linux/Unix with diffirent option.

You later mention CP437 as an encoding used on Windows machines, but also say that “everyone” ignores the specification, which says that only CP437 or UTF-8 should be used. (CP437 is effectively incompatible with ISO 8859-1 and Windows-1252.) I am confused as to what encoding Windows actually uses/assumes. Do some versions use Windows-1252 and others CP437? Please clarify. (Obviously, other encodings must be used for non-Western demographics, as touched upon by another commentator, but let us leave that for now.)

But the real problem is the already mentioned ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252, CP437, and the as-yet unmentioned Shift_JIS, EUCKR, Big5, ISO-8859:s 2 through 15 or however many there are, and so on, and so on.

Really, the only way to reliably open a zip file is to either ask the user for the character encoding (and he probably doesn’t know), or to try and autodetect it.

I’ve had some success using Mozilla’s universalchardet to open Zip files in http://code.google.com/p/theunarchiver/. A friend is currently also helping getting some of the core code to run on Linux. It’s all Objective-C, though, which will probably scare people off from using it.