Greetings Monks,

Here's my bright idea, I need to pass some data to a perl script that will return an image generated from it. Because the data will be embeded into the src tag (ie href='scrip.pl?data=whatever') I need to make sure I encode it as something appropriate for a URL, and I would like to compress it as well.

Right now I have: 

use Convert::Base32 qw();
use Compress::Zlib qw();
$data=Convert::Base32::encode_base32(Compress::Zlib::compress($text));

[download]
So, first question - is Convert::Base32 the way to go? Or are there better alternatives?

Secondly, I am not getting great results with the compression - the data has a very small alphabet (it's basically DNA sequence - 'ACTG' - plus numbers, some whitespace, and a bit of markup - <> and []) so I was thinking it would get shrunk to very little; is there a more appropriate library I should be using?

In reply to compress data to pass in url? by glwtta

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