Question

There is a usage example at the zlib website: http://www.zlib.net/zlib_how.html

However in the example they are compressing a file. I would like to compress a binary data stored in a buffer in memory. I don’t want to save the compressed buffer to disk either.

Basically here is my buffer:

fIplImageHeader->imageData = (char*)imageIn->getFrame();

How can I compress it with zlib?

I would appreciate some code example of how to do that.

Answer 1

This is an example to pack a buffer with zlib and save the compressed contents in a vector.

void compress_memory(void *in_data, size_t in_data_size, std::vector<uint8_t> &out_data)
{
 std::vector<uint8_t> buffer;

 const size_t BUFSIZE = 128 * 1024;
 uint8_t temp_buffer[BUFSIZE];

 z_stream strm;
 strm.zalloc = 0;
 strm.zfree = 0;
 strm.next_in = reinterpret_cast<uint8_t *>(in_data);
 strm.avail_in = in_data_size;
 strm.next_out = temp_buffer;
 strm.avail_out = BUFSIZE;

 deflateInit(&strm, Z_BEST_COMPRESSION);

 while (strm.avail_in != 0)
 {
  int res = deflate(&strm, Z_NO_FLUSH);
  assert(res == Z_OK);
  if (strm.avail_out == 0)
  {
   buffer.insert(buffer.end(), temp_buffer, temp_buffer + BUFSIZE);
   strm.next_out = temp_buffer;
   strm.avail_out = BUFSIZE;
  }
 }

 int deflate_res = Z_OK;
 while (deflate_res == Z_OK)
 {
  if (strm.avail_out == 0)
  {
   buffer.insert(buffer.end(), temp_buffer, temp_buffer + BUFSIZE);
   strm.next_out = temp_buffer;
   strm.avail_out = BUFSIZE;
  }
  deflate_res = deflate(&strm, Z_FINISH);
 }

 assert(deflate_res == Z_STREAM_END);
 buffer.insert(buffer.end(), temp_buffer, temp_buffer + BUFSIZE - strm.avail_out);
 deflateEnd(&strm);

 out_data.swap(buffer);
}