String compression in JavaScript

Question

I\'m looking for a JavaScript function that given a string returns a compressed (shorter) string.

I\'m developing a Chrome web application that saves long strings (H

Answer 1

To me it doesn't seem reasonable to compress a string using UTF-8 as the destination... It looks like just looking for trouble. I think it would be better to lose some compression and using plain 7-bit ASCII as the destination.

In a toy 4 KB JavaScript demo I wrote for fun I used an encoding for the result of compression that stores four binary bytes into five chars chosen from a subset of ASCII of 85 chars that is clean for embedding in a JavaScript string (85^5 is slightly more than 8^4, but still fits in the precision of JavaScript integers). This makes compressed data safe for example for JSON without need of any escaping.