Compress/Decompress NSString in objective-c (iphone) using GZIP or deflate

Question

I have a web-service running on Windows Azure which returns JSON that I consume in my iPhone app.

Unfortunately, Windows Azure doesn\'t seem to support the compressi

Answer 1

I needed to compress data on the iPhone using Objective-c and decompress on PHP. Here is what I used in XCode 11.5 and iOS 12.4:

iOS Objective-c Compression Decompression Test Include libcompression.tbd in the Build Phases -> Link Binary With Library. Then include the header.

#include "compression.h"


NSLog(@"START META DATA COMPRESSION");
NSString *testString = @"THIS IS A COMPRESSION TESTTHIS IS A COMPRESSION TESTTHIS IS A COMPRESSION TESTTHIS IS A COMPRESSION TESTTHIS IS A COMPRESSION TESTTHIS IS A COMPRESSION TEST";
NSData *theData = [testString dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
size_t src_size = theData.length;
uint8_t *src_buffer = (uint8_t*)[theData bytes];
size_t dst_size = src_size+4096;
uint8_t *dst_buffer = (uint8_t*)malloc(dst_size);
dst_size = compression_encode_buffer(dst_buffer, dst_size, src_buffer, src_size, NULL, COMPRESSION_ZLIB);
NSLog(@"originalsize:%zu compressed:%zu", src_size, dst_size);
NSData *dataData = [NSData dataWithBytes:dst_buffer length:sizeof(dst_buffer)];
NSString *compressedDataBase64String = [dataData base64EncodedStringWithOptions:0];    

NSLog(@"Compressed Data %@", compressedDataBase64String);

NSLog(@"START META DATA DECOMPRESSION");
src_size = compression_decode_buffer(src_buffer, src_size, dst_buffer, dst_size, NULL, COMPRESSION_ZLIB);
NSData *decompressed = [[NSData alloc] initWithBytes:src_buffer length:src_size];
NSString *decTestString;
decTestString = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:decompressed encoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding];

NSLog(@"DECOMPRESSED DATA %@", decTestString);

free(dst_buffer);

On the PHP side I used the following function to decompress the data:

function decompressString($compressed_string) {

    //NEED RAW GZINFLATE FOR COMPATIBILITY WITH IOS COMPRESSION_ZLIB WITH IETF RFC 1951
    $full_string = gzinflate($compressed_string);
    return $full_string;

}