Universal Extractor is a program do to exactly what it says: extract files from any type of archive, whether it's a simple zip file, an installation program, or even a Windows Installer (.msi) package. This is still a work in progress (see details below), but so far it's proven quite useful and I feel others can also benefit from it.

I should stress that this application is not intended to be a general purpose archiving program. It will never replace WinRAR, 7-Zip, etc. What it will do is allow you to extract files from virtually any type of archive, regardless of source, compression method, etc. The original motivation behind this project was that I wanted an easy, convenient way to extract files from installation packages, such as Inno Setup or Windows Installer packages, without pulling up a command line every time. In the process I got a little carried away and ended up throwing in support for every kind of archive format I possibly could find.

Universal Extractor, like most of my Windows programs, is written in AutoIt, a powerful open source scripting language. Universal Extractor itself, however, is just a front-end that uses many other programs to do the dirty work. Please see the Credits section below for additional information.