How can I programmatically identify a self extracting executable, and extract the contained files?

Question

I did some basic research, and it seems that there is no one standard to create these. I saw a number of code project pages that had code for building such an exe, but no reference on how to identify one, nor if it possible to extract files without actually running the application.

So the questions are:

1. Is there a method I can use to identify if a particular file is a self extracting exe?
2. Are there a few formats that are extremely common in the computing industry
3. If so, do these formats allow for extraction without running the packaging exe?
4. If not, is there a method to run such a file in some sort of sandbox environment, allowing us to see the resulting files (on Windows)?

Note I'm open to both programmatic solutions or those using third party utilities/libraries.