Searching for a Fast Lossless Compression Technique

Question

I want to compress a string of bits and after that I want to decompress it. Can any body help me by mentioning a Fast Lossless Compression and Decompression Technique and if possible than it's programming implementation.

Answer 1

If you're looking for speed, then considering a fast compression algorithm like LZ4 makes sense. Such algorithm is an order of magnitude faster than zlib/gzip (like 10x faster). http://code.google.com/p/lz4/

Answer 2

What about the ever-green called gzip or bzip2? They come already as library, ready to use.