How do you compress a string, and get a string back using zlib?

Question

I am trying to utilize Zlib for text compression.

For example I have a string T='blah blah blah blah' I need to compress it for this string. I am using S=zlib.compress(T) to compress it. Now what I want is to get the non-binary form of S so that I can decompress T but in a different program.

Thanks!

EDIT: I guess I got a method to solve what I wanted. Here is the method:

import zlib, base64 text = 'STACK OVERFLOW STACK OVERFLOW STACK OVERFLOW STACK OVERFLOW STACK OVERFLOW STACK OVERFLOW STACK OVERFLOW STACK OVERFLOW STACK OVERFLOW STACK OVERFLOW ' code =  base64.b64encode(zlib.compress(text,9)) print code 

Which gives:

eNoLDnF09lbwD3MNcvPxD1cIHhxcAE9UKaU= 

Now I can copy this code to a different program to get the original variable back:

import zlib, base64 s='eNoLDnF09lbwD3MNcvPxD1cIHhxcAE9UKaU=' data = zlib.decompress(base64.b64decode(s)) print data 

Please suggest if you are aware of any other compression method which would give better results that are consistent with the above code.

Answer 1

Program 1:

T = 'blah blah blah blah' S = zlib.compress(T) with open("temp.zlib", "wb") as myfile:     myfile.write(S) 

This saves the compressed string in a file called temp.zlib so that program 2 can later retrieve and decompress it.

Program 2:

with open("temp.zlib", "rb") as myfile:     S = myfile.read() T = zlib.decompress(S)