How To Compress and Decompress Strings in C#

You need a way to compress the data you write to a file using one of the stream-based classes. In addition, you need a way to decompress the data from this compressed file when you read it back in.

Use the System.IO.Compression.DeflateStream or the System.IO.Compression. GZipStream classes to read and write compressed data to a file. The Compress and DeCompress methods shown below demonstrate how to use these classes to compress and expand data on the fly.

using System.IO.Compression;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;

public class Demo
{
    publicstaticstring Compress(string text)
    {
        byte[] buffer = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(text);
        MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream();
        using (GZipStream zip = new GZipStream(ms, CompressionMode.Compress, true))
        {
            zip.Write(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);
        }

        ms.Position = 0;
        MemoryStream outStream = new MemoryStream();

        byte[] compressed = newbyte[ms.Length];
        ms.Read(compressed, 0, compressed.Length);

        byte[] gzBuffer = newbyte[compressed.Length + 4];
        System.Buffer.BlockCopy(compressed, 0, gzBuffer, 4, compressed.Length);
        System.Buffer.BlockCopy(BitConverter.GetBytes(buffer.Length), 0, gzBuffer, 0, 4);
        return Convert.ToBase64String(gzBuffer);
    }

    publicstaticstring Decompress(string compressedText)
    {
        byte[] gzBuffer = Convert.FromBase64String(compressedText);
        using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream())
        {
            int msgLength = BitConverter.ToInt32(gzBuffer, 0);
            ms.Write(gzBuffer, 4, gzBuffer.Length - 4);

            byte[] buffer = newbyte[msgLength];

            ms.Position = 0;
            using (GZipStream zip = new GZipStream(ms, CompressionMode.Decompress))
            {
                zip.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);
            }

            return Encoding.UTF8.GetString(buffer);
        }
    }
}

The strings need to be longer than 3-400 characters; otherwise the compression rate is not good enough.