Question

This may sound foolish, but I’m wondering all the same…

Is it possible to take a string composed of a given character set and compress it by using a bigger character set, or composing it into a number then converting it back at one?

For example, if you had a string that you know what be composed of [a-z][A-Z][0-9]-_+=, could you turn that into a number, the swap it back using more characters in order to compress it?

This is an area I’m not familiar with, I still want to keep it as a string, just a shorter one. (for displaying/echoing/etc, not memory)

Answer 1

I wouldn’t bother doing that, unless the string is huge. You can then try to compress it with commons-compress or java.util.zip