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

I think you should also look into lz-string it's fast a compresses quite well and has some advantages they list on their page:

What about other libraries?

• some LZW implementations which gives you back arrays of numbers (terribly inefficient to store as tokens take 64bits) and don't support any character above 255.
• some other LZW implementations which gives you back a string (less terribly inefficient to store but still, all tokens take 16 bits) and don't support any character above 255.
• an LZMA implementation that is asynchronous and very slow - but hey, it's LZMA, not the implementation that is slow.
• a GZip implementation not really meant for browsers but meant for node.js, which weighted 70kb (with deflate.js and crc32.js on which it depends).

The reasons why the author created lz-string:

• Working on mobile I needed something fast.
• Working with Strings gathered from outside my website, I needed something that can take any kind of string as an input, including any UTF characters above 255.
• The library not taking 70kb was a definitive plus. Something that produces strings as compact as possible to store in localStorage. So none of the libraries I could find online worked well for my needs.

There are implementations of this lib in other languages, I am currently looking into the python implementation, but the decompression seems to have issues at the moment, but if you stick to JS only it looks really good to me.