[Chicago-talk] ASCII compression?

[Jim Thomason]

Because my output is being fed into a single 3of9 barcode, which is
alphanumeric only. Upper case letters, numbers, and spaces. All I got.

If my resulting compressed output contains anything different, it's worthless.

Presumably I could then encode that output into alphanumeric, but
that's very likely to end up increasing the string size. So I'd need a
very tight compression algorithm with a very tight ascii converter.
Not saying that it doesn't exist, it just sounds like a longshot vs.
something that just compresses into alphanumeric.

-Jim....


On Thu, 28 Oct 2004 16:19:38 -0500, Don Drake <don at drakeconsult.com> wrote:
> Why ASCII only?  Why not use your favorite compression and then pass it to
> Uuencode?
> 
> http://search.cpan.org/~mlehmann/Compress-LZF-1.0b/LZF.pm
> 
> and
> 
> http://search.cpan.org/dist/Convert-UU/lib/Convert/UU.pm
> 
> Do the opposite when you want the data back.
> 
> -Don
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: chicago-talk-bounces at mail.pm.org
> [mailto:chicago-talk-bounces at mail.pm.org] On Behalf Of Jim Thomason
> Sent: Thursday, October 28, 2004 3:46 PM
> To: Chicago.pm chatter
> Subject: [Chicago-talk] ASCII compression?
> 
> Anybody know of any good algorithms to do ascii-only compression?
> 
> That is, I'm going to spit in ascii data, and I want to read out ascii data.
> 
> More specifically, I have 14 chunks of 6 numbers. And I want to
> compress it all into a single string that contains only upper case
> letters and numbers that can be later decompressed and broken back
> into those 14 chunks.
> 
> Currently, I'm base-36 encoding the chunks. It seems to save me 33% of
> the space, 6 digits -> 4 digits.
> 
> Further, ideally, I'd like to avoid using an external lookup table. If
> I'm going to have an external table, I'd just dump my entire value
> into it and then read it out as a single integer ID lookup value. :-)
> I may end up just falling back on this, though.
> 
> Any suggestions?
> 
> -Jim.....
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