You use 'inflate', whereas I believe the gzip man page mentions 'deflate' for the compression mode. Did I misunderstand? I suspect compress/deflate is analogous to making a balloon smaller by deflating it.

Assuming you want to send out content in gzip'ed form and the images are static, you may want to place them in a separate directory, serve them from a lightweight process (thttpd, nginx, or a lean apache) or behind a proxy server (squid, varnish, pound, whichever you prefer). Granted, that's a non-programming solution which may not fit your case.

For storing gzip'ed data, I suppose IO::Compress::Gzip would allow you to gzip() to store to a scalar reference.

Shamelessly stolen from the synopsis and altered off-the-cuff: 

use IO::Compress::Gzip qw(gzip $GzipError);

my $gzip_data;
my $status = gzip $input => \$gzip_data [,OPTS] 
    or die "gzip failed: $GzipError\n";

[download]

Would this be what you're looking for? I suppose it's not too difficult to send out $gzip_data to a HTTP client end of the Perl code. Or did I simply mistake what you're trying to do?

In reply to Re: Gzip inflate a variable by rkrieger
in thread Gzip inflate a variable by MonkDrew

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