KISSC

A small, simple, and easy-to-use JavaScript compression library. Supports Unicode strings.

Statement of support

This library is finished, no additional development is planned. It is to the best of my knowledge bug-free, and should be considered a safer choice than more complicated libraries. The issue tracker is open, and any issue opened will generellay be dealt with.

Usage

The kissc.compress function takes two arguments, first the string to be compressed, second an optional encoding parameter. An encoding value of 6 (default) will produce a BASE64 string that is safe in pretty much any context. An encoding value of 15 will produce a BASE32768 string that is safe to use in JavaScript and LocalStorage, is legal Unicode, and contain no code points below 256.

The kissc.decompress function takes two arguments, first the compressed string, second an optional maximum length. The encoding is detected automatically. If the string is found to be invalid, or would produce an output longer than the maximum length, false is returned instead of the decompressed string. If no maximum length is specified, a rogue compressed string could be used to crash the browser by producing a too large string.

var compressedString = kissc.compress("String to be compressed.");
var originalString = kissc.decompress(compressedString);

var compressedString2 = kissc.compress("Another string to be compressed.",15);
var originalString2 = kissc.decompress(compressedString2,100000);

Bullet points

• Very small library, 12 kB without minification or compression, no dependencies.
• Handles around 5 MB/s in modern desktop browsers.
• Can deal with over 100 MB data in modern desktop browsers.
• Very high compression ratio for very repetitive strings.
• Reasonable compression for somewhat repetitive strings.
• Permissive licence.

Update history

August 2015 - Initial release

November 2015 - Version 1.1

• Secondary index mechanism, finds more matches, better compression.
• Rewritten to rely mostly on arrays, better performance, lower memory footprint in browsers where typed arrays are supported.
• Completely compatible with initial release.