ZLIB

 

NAME

zlib – compression/decompression library  

SYNOPSIS

[see zlib.h for full description]  

DESCRIPTION

The zlib library is a general purpose data compression library. The code is thread safe, assuming that the standard library functions used are thread safe, such as memory allocation routines. It provides in-memory compression and decompression functions, including integrity checks of the uncompressed data. This version of the library supports only one compression method (deflation) but other algorithms may be added later with the same stream interface.

Compression can be done in a single step if the buffers are large enough or can be done by repeated calls of the compression function. In the latter case, the application must provide more input and/or consume the output (providing more output space) before each call.

The library also supports reading and writing files in gzip(1) (.gz) format with an interface similar to that of stdio.

The library does not install any signal handler. The decoder checks the consistency of the compressed data, so the library should never crash even in the case of corrupted input.

All functions of the compression library are documented in the file zlib.h. The distribution source includes examples of use of the library in the files test/example.c and test/minigzip.c, as well as other examples in the examples/ directory.

Changes to this version are documented in the file ChangeLog that accompanies the source.

zlib is available in Java using the java.util.zip package:

http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Programming/compression/

A Perl interface to zlib, written by Paul Marquess <[email protected]>, is available at CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) sites, including:

http://search.cpan.org/~pmqs/IO-Compress-Zlib/

A Python interface to zlib, written by A.M. Kuchling <[email protected]>, is available in Python 1.5 and later versions:

http://docs.python.org/library/zlib.html

zlib is built into tcl:

http://wiki.tcl.tk/4610

An experimental package to read and write files in .zip format, written on top of zlib by Gilles Vollant <[email protected]>, is available at:

http://www.winimage.com/zLibDll/minizip.html and also in the contrib/minizip directory of the main zlib source distribution.