based on SMAZ - C implementation by Salvatore Sanfilippo
Install-Package SmazSharp
SmazSharp is a simple compression library suitable for compressing very short strings. General purpose compression libraries will build the state needed for compressing data dynamically, in order to be able to compress every kind of data. This is a very good idea, but not for a specific problem: compressing small strings will not work.
SmazSharp instead is not good for compressing general purpose data, but can compress text by 40-50% in the average case (works better with English), and is able to perform a bit of compression for HTML and urls as well. The important point is that Smaz is able to compress even strings of two or three bytes!
For example the string "the" is compressed into a single byte.
To compare this with other libraries, think that like zlib will usually not be able to compress text shorter than 100 bytes.
- 'This is a small string' compressed by 50%
- 'foobar' compressed by 34%
- 'the end' compressed by 58%
- 'not-a-g00d-Exampl333' enlarged by 15%
- 'Smaz is a simple compression library' compressed by 39%
- 'Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide' compressed by 49%
- 'this is an example of what works very well with smaz' compressed by 49%
- '1000 numbers 2000 will 10 20 30 compress very little' compressed by 10%
In general, lowercase English will work very well. It will degrade with a lot of numbers inside the strings. Other languages are compressed pretty well too, the following is Italian, not very similar to English but still compressible by SmazSharp:
- 'Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai in una selva oscura' compressed by 33%
- 'Mi illumino di immenso' compressed by 37%
- 'L'autore di questa libreria vive in Sicilia' compressed by 28%
It can compress URLS pretty well:
- 'http://google.com' compressed by 59%
- 'http://programming.reddit.com' compressed by 52%
- 'http://github.com/antirez/smaz/tree/master' compressed by 46%
The library consists of two primary functions:
byte[] SmazSharp.Smaz.Compress(string Input);Compress the Input string and return the compressed data in a byte array.
string SmazSharp.Smaz.Decompress(byte[] Input);Decompress the Input byte array and return the decompressed data as a string.
SmazSharp is based on SMAZ, written by Salvatore Sanfilippo which was released under the BSD license. Check the COPYING file for more information.