A "bidirectional transformation" - exactly what I thought! But I did not think about that compressing of short strings might not buy me much! So thank you for that!
In regards to using a digest: I think I will have to benchmark some possible solutions (sigh) and measure how well compression on my type/length of strings actually is. I will post an update with my results if I find the time to do that... Anyway, thank you all for the quick thoughts!

Update:
It seems my strings reach a break-even on lengths of around 120. Strings shorter than that are compressed actually longer than the original. (Exactly what Fletch observed) I think I will have to look somewhere else for a gain...

In reply to Re^2: How good is gzip data as digest? by isync
in thread How good is gzip data as digest? by isync

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