Dearchiver that can “intelligently” decide whether to extract into a new folder or not

Question

Am I the only one who gets annoyed by these two related problems when extracting downloaded archives:

1. I "extract here", which means all the contents of the archive will be dumped into the current folder.
   So if the contents are not inside a folder in the archive, they "pollute" the current folder with bits and pieces of the archive, some of which are hard to spot.
2. I "extract into new folder", which creates a new folder of the same name as the archive and dumps all the contents into that. But if the archiver thoughtfully put all its contents into a single folder already I end up with two nested folders, the outer one of which contains nothing else.

Obviously 2. is far less annoying than 1. and a workaround is to just always use the second method then get rid of the extra layer of "onion peel" folders.

But this is the kind of dumb repetitive thing computers are good at. So why not:

• "Smart extract here", which would check the contents of the archive and then:
  1. If the top level of the archive contains just a folder, then extract it into the current folder.
  2. If the top level of the archive contains anything other than just one folder, create a new folder with the same name as the archive, then extract the archive into that.

Requirements:

• Runs on Windows 7 with a user interface that hooks into the standard Windows file explorer.
• Supports ZIP.
• Can handle non-ASCII file names!

Nice to have:

• Support for formats other than ZIP

Answer 1

WinRAR, if properly configured, can do what you described as 'Smart Extraction'. Quoting its changelog:

Version 3.60
New "Remove duplicate folders from extraction path" option in "Settings/Compression" dialog.

If this option is on and you unpack an archive which root folder has no files and only one 'somename' folder and if destination folder is new or empty and also ends with '/somename', WinRAR will exclude one 'somename' from resulting 'somename/somename' path.

Version 3.90
"Remove duplicate folders from extraction path" option in "Settings/Compression" dialog is replaced by more universal "Remove redundant folders from extraction path" option. This option will eliminate redundant archive name based folders from extraction path if you unpack an archive with "Extract to DestName\" context menu command and if archive root folder contains only one folder and no files.

WinRAR can extract ZIP, 7z, RAR, and other archive file formats. It also supports non-ASCII, Unicode file names.

Answer 2

For those who search for a free, ad free and open source option (WinRAR is shareware and Bandizip has ads as of version 7), PeaZip can do this as well.

In the PeaZip help there are some mentions of this feature like:

"Extract here (smart)" works as “Smart new folder” option in extraction screen,
avoiding creation of a new extra directory if a single file or folder is extracted

Answer 3

7-Zip

Eliminate duplication of root folder: That option allows to eliminate duplication of root folder for "Extract to" operations, if all files in archive are placed in folder with name that is identical to name of output folder.

Answer 4

Bandizip has a 'Smart Extraction' feature. In the software interface, it is called 'Extract Automatically'.

When you choose an archive file and click the right mouse button, there is the 'Extract Automatically' menu.

It will function like below.

1. If there is only one file/folder in an archive, it will extract to the 'Current Folder'.
2. In other cases, it will create a new folder and extract files to the 'Created Folder'.

^{Source: http://www.bandisoft.com/bandizip/help/auto_dest/}
Bandizip supports Unicode filenames:

Bandizip fully supports Unicode to ensure international characters are displayed for filenames in archives. Non-English characters in file names will be displayed properly and it will be extracted without breaking international characters.

Aside from ZIP, Bandizip supports various formats...

...including RAR, 7Z, ACE, ALZ, APK, ARJ, BH, BZ, BZ2, CAB, EGG, GZ, J2J, JAR, IMG, IPA, ISO, LHA, LZH, LZMA, PMA, TBZ, TBZ2, TGZ, TLZ, TXZ, UDF, WAR, WIM, XZ, and Z.

Some of the more noteworthy differences of Bandizip from my other suggestion, WinRAR are:

• Bandizip is freeware, while WinRAR is shareware.
• WinRAR can prevent certain file types from extracting. Bandizip can't.
• WinRAR allows 'user defined archive extensions'. This includes integrating its context menus for user-defined custom file extensions. Bandizip only allows a pre-defined set of file extensions to have its integrated context menus.

For a detailed comparison, see the list of features for Bandizip and WinRAR.