Regarding the compression used by zip and gzip - while it is true that zip can use a multitude of compression formats, the most common out in the wild is deflate, which is exactly what gzip uses.

Also, although zip isn't designed for being streamed, it is still possible to stream from a zip file. So say you have a zip file "my.zip" and you want to stream the member "abc.txt", this will do it

    use IO::Uncompress::Unzip qw( $UnzipError);

    my $unzip = new IO::Uncompress::Unzip "my.zip",
                       Name => "abc.txt"
        or die "Cannot open my.zip[abc.txt]: $UnzipError\n";
    while <($unzip>)
    {
        ...
    }
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