Question

I’m looking for a LZW compression algorithm in C# that takes a “string” and returns a string.
I’ve googling for hours and all I’ve found use MemoryStream, BinaryWriters, etc.

I just want to be able to do something like:


string _data = "12345";

string _result = CompressToLZW(_data);


and then pass that string via Ajax to the browser. I already have the LZW decompression algorithm for javascript (http://rosettacode.org/wiki/LZW_compression#JavaScript)

Thanks.-

UPDATE:

This is the code I’m using right now with http://paste.lisp.org/display/12198

    string _data = "12345_12345_12345_12345";

    byte[] byteArray = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(_data);

    MemoryStream _st = new MemoryStream(byteArray);

    StreamReader _sr = new StreamReader(_st);

    MemoryStream streamoutput = new MemoryStream();

    BinaryWriter _output= new BinaryWriter(streamoutput);

    LZW.Compress(_sr, _output);

    string _res = (new StreamReader(_output.BaseStream)).ReadToEnd();

    return _res;

UPDATE 2
I found a source code in C# that does the work at http://code.google.com/p/sharp-lzw/source/browse/
Thanks.-

Answer 1

Use something like this:

private string CompressToLZW(string input)
{
    using (MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream())
    {
        ComputeLZW(input, stream);
        stream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
        using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(stream))
        {
            return reader.ReadToEnd();
        }
    }
}

where ComputeLZW() is the LZW method you have that uses a stream.