I solved the problem and posted it here (http://www.coderanch.com/t/530362/Streams/java/Zip-file-archive-comment-extended).

Thought it might help, sorry for the delay.

Ivan

I am trying to figure out how to write the registered trademark ‘®’ and copyright character ‘©’ to the archive comment for a zip file. This is not a comment for the ZipEntry, although the solution may be similar; but, rather, the whole zip file comment, as you have retrieved in your example above.

I have tried a lot of different things; but, at the end of the day, the setComment() method on the JarOutputStream (which extends ZipOutputStream) writes a “circumflex a” (i.e., an ‘Â’) before the extended ASCII characters.

So, instead of:

MySoftware®
Copyright © 2011

I get:

MySoftware®
Copyright © 2011

when viewing the archive comments using WinZip or PKZIP or 7-ZIP or any other archive tool I have tried (including your code above).

I have tried converting to Unicode; but, since the setComment() implementation only writes single bytes, I get a literal ‘\u00A9′ string in the comment.

Can you tell me how to write (and/or replace) the comments to a zip file without using the setComment() method. I have tried appending the comment directly to the end of the file using other suggestions; but I am somehow corrupting the archive when doing so.

I know that I could simply use ‘(R)’ and ‘(c)’ instead, but I would rather use the extended ASCII characters, as they look better. I also know that this can be done via WinZip’s command line utility; but I would like to use Java so I don’t have to buy a zip license just to add an archive comment to a jar file. I also know that this might have been fixed with Java 7 (with the addition of Charset arg in constructor); but I must use 1.6 for the time being.

Thank you in advance for any help you can offer.

First, put an if the commentLen is > 0, then multiply it by -1 (yes, avoid negative values) (after line 45).
Second, changed line 52. realLen was always returning 10 bytes smaller than the realLen of the comment. So, I just removed that Math.min and put just commentLen.