Historically, the ZIP format did not mandate a standard metadata encoding. This frequently causes files with non-English characters in their names (like Cercle Ø168.zip ) to break or become garbled when unzipped on a different operating system. ⚡ The Verdict

Base64 is an encoding algorithm, not encryption. Anyone can decode it. If the data is sensitive, password-protect the ZIP with AES-256 before converting it to Base64.

Base64 is the absolute industry standard for this operation.

If extracting via command line in Linux or macOS and facing broken filenames, use unzip -O CP437 file.zip (substituting CP437 with the origin system's language encoding, like Shift-JIS for Japanese).

💡 If you are building an application that manipulates ZIP files, modern frameworks like .NET and Java have built-in libraries that handle UTF-8 flag detections automatically.

Could you clarify if you are looking to a ZIP file into a text string, or if you are trying to fix broken filenames within an existing archive? How to get the encoded name of a ZipEntry? #401 - GitHub