compression library for c and php

Question

To save network traffic I'd like to compress my data. The only trick is that I the client is a c application and the server is php. I'm looking for an open source compression library that's available for both c and php.

I guess I could write an external c application to decompress my data, but I'm trying to avoid spawning extra processes on the server.

If you know of any, please post it!

Answer 1

gzip is one of the most (if not the most) popular compression scheme. PHP has supported it since version 4. If you need even better compression, consider bzip2.

Answer 2

Zlib provides C APIs, and is part of the PHP functional API as well.