7-Zip fully supports 7z archives.
7-Zip creates fully ZIP compatible archives. It means that everyone can decompress these files by any ZIP compatible decompression utility. During compression 7-Zip can use one of the following ZIP compression methods:
The current version of the 7-Zip can extract any files from ZIP archive that were compressed with one of the following methods:
Files compressed with other ZIP compression methods can't be extracted by the current version of the 7-Zip. But supported methods are the most popular now and it causes 7-Zip can decompress the most of ZIP archives. For extracting files compressed with non-supported methods you must use some other ZIP utility.
Zip format has limitation for maximum number of files in one archive: 65535 files. But this limitation is not critical. 7-Zip can create zip archives containing more than 65535 files. You must know that some zip decompressors can't decompress all files from zip archives containing more than 65535 files, but some decompressors (e.g. info-zip) can handle with such archives.
Standard Zip format doesn't support compressing files that are larger than 4 GB. Also there is 4GB limitation for total archive size.
The current version of the 7-Zip doesn't support Zip multivolume archives.
7-Zip fully supports GZIP files.
7-Zip fully supports TAR files.
7-Zip fully supports BZip2 files. BZip2 module in 7-Zip is based on sources of original program that supports bz2 files - bzip2. The home page of original bzip2 can be found at http://www.muraroa.demon.co.uk.
7-Zip supports RAR archives only for listing, browsing and decompressing.
7-Zip supports CAB archives only for listing, browsing and decompressing.
7-Zip supports ARJ archives only for listing, browsing and decompressing.
7-Zip supports cpio archives only for listing, browsing and decompressing.
7-Zip supports RPM archives only for listing, browsing and decompressing.
7-Zip supports DEB archives only for listing, browsing and decompressing.
7-Zip supports split files only for listing, browsing and decompressing.