How do I gzip compress a string in Perl

Question

I have a string that I would like to compress using GZip before inserting into a database as a BLOB. However, it seems that the built in GZip Perl modules are all designed to compress files, not inline strings.

In PHP I would accomplish this with $compressed = gzcompress($string)

What is a Perl equivalent of PHP's gzcompress()?

Answer 1

There is a gzip function in IO::Compress::Gzip that should do what you need. Something like this:

gzip \$input => \$output

would be more or less equivalent to your PHP. Note the use of references to scalars if you want to do everything in memory buffers, if you use plain scalars then gzip will think they're filenames.

Answer 2

Perhaps http://perldoc.perl.org/IO/Compress/Gzip.html ?

Answer 3

use Compress::Zlib;
#then $out = compress($in) or $out = uncompress($in)