lz-string

LZ-based compression algorithm for JavaScript

Important

The file layout has changed in version 2, this is now a joint commonjs / esmodule project so modern build tools should be happy with it, but if importing a file directly (such as in a direct javascript project) it is important to use the correct one.

Tip

The "old style" minified AMD file is available as dist/index.umd.js via various CDNs or package managers.

Install via npm

$ npm install -g lz-string
$ lz-string input.txt > output.txt

Home page

Home page for this program with examples, documentation and a live demo: http://pieroxy.net/blog/pages/lz-string/index.html

Command line

If installed globally there is a command line tool available, and a test suite that can use it to show things are working properly. If other langauges build a command line tool that supports the same arguments then the test suite can be run against them too.

$ lz-string -h
Usage: cli [options] [input-file]

Use lz-string to compress or decompress a file

Arguments:
  input-file                  file to process, if no file then read from stdin

Options:
  -V, --version               output the version number
  -d, --decompress            if unset then this will compress
  -e, --encoder <type>        character encoding to use (choices: "base64", "encodeduri", "raw", "uint8array", "utf16", default: "raw")
  -v, --verify                verify before returning (default: true)
  -b, --binary <file>         lz-string binary to use (default: "../dist/index.js")
  -l, --legacy                use legacy mode where uint8array decompression must be an even length
  -o, --output <output-file>  output file, otherwise write to stdout
  -q, --quiet                 don't print any error messages
  -h, --help                  display help for command

Other languages

This lib has numerous ports to other languages, for server side processing, mostly. Here they are:

Caution

These are all developed separately, so if you are using two versions to transfer data (such as a client and server version) it is important to check that they are compatible and have identical behaviours on the data!

Note

Version 1.3.8 of this package had a slight change in the encoding which might impact compatibility.

• Java: by Diogo Duailibe
• Java: by rufushuang, with base64 support and better performances
• C#: by Jawa-the-Hutt
• C#: by kreudom, another implementation in C#, more up to date
• PHP: by nullpunkt
• Python3: by eduardtomasek
• Another Python: by marcel-dancak
• Ruby by Altivi
• Go I helped a friend to write a Go implementation of the decompression algorithm
• Go Austin wrote the decompression part as well
• Go by daku10, another implementation supports multiple encoding formats and can be used as a CLI tool
• Elixir by Michael Shapiro
• C++/QT by AmiArt
• C++ by Andrey Krasnov, another implementation in C++11
• VB.NET by gsemac
• Salesforce Apex (Java like language): bilal did the port
• Kotlin: from Zen Liu
• Dart: from skipness
• Haxe: from markknol
• Rust: from adumbidiot