Compressing a byte array

This topic demonstrates how to compress a byte array using the static Compress method of the QuickCompression class.

Basic steps

To compress a byte array, the following steps must be taken:

Retrieve a byte array containing the data to compress. For the purposes of this example, we will convert the string to compress to a byte array using the GetBytes method.
Compress the data. The resulting compressed data will be returned as a byte array.

Demonstration

The following example demonstrates how to compress an array of bytes using the static Compress method of the QuickCompression class.

VB.NET Copy Code

VB.NET	Copy Code
`Imports Xceed.Compression` `Dim data() As Byte = System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes("This is the data to compress compress compress") Dim compressedData() As Byte = QuickCompression.Compress(data)`

Imports Xceed.Compression

Dim data() As Byte = System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes("This is the data to compress compress compress") Dim compressedData() As Byte = QuickCompression.Compress(data)

C#	Copy Code
`using Xceed.Compression; byte[] data = System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes( "This is the data to compress compress compress" ); byte[] compressedData = QuickCompression.Compress( data );`

Things you should consider

The main questions you should ask yourself when compressing data read from a stream are:

Do you want to compress data as it is written to a stream? Use the Write method of the CompressedStream class.
Do you want to compress a string? Convert it to a byte array before passing it to the Compress method using the GetBytes method of the .NET Framework's System.Text.Encoding class.
Do you need to convert the resulting compressed byte array to a string? Use the GetString method of the .NET Framework's System.Text.Encoding class.