continuing my reply, PHP is a server-side language, you can archive a file that is on your server, but you cant arcive a file that is on someone elses computer and then upload it to server. If you are talking about your own computer, then you can run the script that will archive the file using a command-line archiving tool, and then upload it to the server, but you will need an archiver on the server to unarchive the file. But why even bother going through all that? unless your files are over 10-15 megabyte in size, and a text tile that large can contain a small library, it would be faster and more efficient to upload them as just pure text files.